Life with Picasso Quotes

“No one is indispensable to anyone else. You imagine you're necessary to him or that he will be very unhappy if you leave him, but I'm sure that if you do, within three months he will have fitted another face into your role and you'll see that no one is suffering because of your absence. You must feel free to do whatever feels best to you. Being someone's nurse is no way to live unless you're unable to do anything else. You have to say something on your own and you ought to be thinking, first and foremost, about that.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“One day when I went to see him (Picasso), we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, 'Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I'm concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.'I told him I had often noticed in his dealings with others that he considered the rest of the world only little grains of dust. But I said, as it happened, I was a little grain of dust gifted with autonomous movement and who didn't therefore need a broom. I could go out by myself.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“He told me that from now on, everything I did and everything he did was of the utmost importance: any word spoken, the slightest gesture, would take on a meaning, and everything that happened between us would change us continually. 'For that reason,'he said,'I wish I were able to suspend time at this moment and keep things exactly at this point, because I feel this instant is a true beginning. We have a definite but unknown quantity of experience at our disposal. As soon as the hourglass is turned, the sand will begin to run out and once it starts, it cannot stop until it's all gone. That's why I wish I could hold it back at the start. We should make a minimum of gestures, pronounce a minimum of words, even see each other as seldom as possible, if that would prolong things. We don't know how much of everything we have ahead of us so we have to take the greatest precautions not to destroy the beauty of what we have. Everything exists in limited quantity-especially happiness. If a love is to come into being, it is all written down somewhere, and also its duration and content. If you could arrive at the complete intensity the first day, it would be ended the first day. And so if it's something you want so much that you'd like to have it prolonged in time, you must be extremely careful not to make the slightest excessive demand that might prevent it from developing to the greatest extent over the longest period...If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn't touch them. We mustn't abuse something which is to bring light into both our lives. Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing wih you seems like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open...”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“We mustn't be afraid of inventing anything...Everething there is in us exists in nature. After all, we're part of nature. If it resembles nature, that's fine. If it doesn't, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn't have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“...since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“What interests me is to set up what you might call the rapport de grand écart - the most unexpected relationship possible between the things I want to speak about, because there is a certain difficulty in establishing relationships in just that way, and in that difficulty there is an interest, and in that interest there is a certain tension and for me that tension is a lot more important than the stable equilibrium of harmony, which doesn't interest me at all. Reality must be torn apart in every sense of the word. What people forget is that everything is unique. Nature never produces the same thing twice. Hence my stress on seeking the rapport de grand écart: a small head on a large body; a large head on a small body. I want to draw the mind in the direction it's not used to and wake it up. I want to help the viewer discover something he wouldn't have discovered without me. That's why I stress the dissimilarity, for example, between the left eye and the right eye. A painter shouldn't make them so similar. They're just not that way. So my purpose is to set things in movement, to provoke this movement by contradictory tensions, opposing forces, and in that tension or opposition, to find the moment which seems the most interesting to me.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“Pablo's many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérese and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just offstage in our own life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all women he had collected in his private museum. But he didn't cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“The heart of the problem, I soon came to understand, was that with Pablo there must always be a victor and a vanquished. I could not be satisfied with being a victor, nor, I think, could anyone who is emotionally mature. There was nothing gained by being vanquished either, because with Pablo, the moment you were vanquished he lost all interest. Since I loved him, I couldn't afford to be vanquished. What does one do in a dilemma like that?”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“And you, you’re an angel,’ he said, scornfully, ‘but an angel from a hot place. Since I’m the devil, that makes you one of my subjects. I think I’ll brand you.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“You're trying to swim upstream against the current. What is there about the natural flow of the river of life that has shocked you so strongly that you should want to swim against the current, even against time? You ought to know you're lost even before you begin. I don't understand you but I love you and I suppose you are obeying the law of your being.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“My grandmother's death had given me a heightened sense of individual solitude, of each one of us walking towards his own death, with no one able to help us or hold us back.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“As I was growing up, whenever anything frightened me in any degree, it fascinated me at the same time. I felt the need of going too far simply to prove to myself that I was capable of it.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“لم يعد شكلي الخارجي خارقا. ومن جانب اخر لم اكن اراه معيبا. لم اخش اي شيء, موضوعية ومجردة في كل احكامي وحرة بوداعة من مختلف الاوهام التي تنعم بها قلة التجربة على الشباب. باختصار رأيت نفسي فيلسوفة محنكة متنكرة بشكل فتاة صغيرة”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Don't imagine you could ever take my place.' I told her I had never wanted to; I only wanted to occupy the one that was empty.”
― Francoise Gilot, Life With Picasso

“Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around now to complicate my existence. Maybe that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.
-Pablo Picasse after Francoise left him”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Pablo had told me, that first afternoon I visited him alone, in February 1944, that he felt our relationship would bring light into both our lives. My coming to him, he said, seemed like a window that was opening up and he wanted it to remain open. I did, too, as long as it let in the light. When it no longer did, I closed it, much against my own desire. From that moment on, he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful for him for that.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“So how do you go about teaching them something new? By mixing what they know with what they don’t know. Then, when they see vaguely in their fog something they recognize, they think, ‘Ah, I know that.’ And then it’s just one more step to, ‘Ah, I know the whole thing.’ And their mind thrusts forward into the unknown and they begin to recognize what they didn’t know before and they increase their powers of understanding.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“حينما اعمل اترك جسدي وراء الباب مثلما يخلع المسلمون احذيتهم قبل الدخول الى المسجد”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Velika većina ljudi ne poseduje u sebi nimalo izumiteljskog ili kreativnog duha. Kao što Hegel kaže, oni mogu znati samo ono što već znaju. I na koji način ih naučiti nečem novom?
Miješanjem onoga što znaju, s onim što ne znaju. Kad u svojoj magli ugledaju neke poznate obrise, oni pomišljaju : Ah, znam što je to.
A od toga je samo jedan korak do : - Ah, znam što sve to predstavlja!
I njihov se um usmjeruje u pravcu nepoznatog i oni počinju sagledavati ono što ranije nisu mogli, što proširuje moć njihova razumijevanja.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Nisam vjerovao u slikarstvo za "izabrane". Uvijek sam osjećao da slika mora pobuditi nešto i kod onoga tko je ne običava inače gledati, kao što Moliere uspijeva nasmijati vrlo inteligentnog čovjeka, kao i onoga koji ništa ne razumije. Shakespeare također. I u mom radu, jednako kao i u Shakespeareovom, često se mogu susresti burleskne stvari, relativno čak i vulgarne.Na taj način mogu svakome biti dostupan. To nije zbog toga što bih želio dobrodošlicu publike, već što želim doprijeti do svakog stupnja mišljenja.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“We are living out a kind of reprieve and when you come to realize that, you live no longer for yourself, but as much for the sight of a flower or for the odor of something or for other people as for your own desires or comfort. Because you know your time is limited.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“When they decided it was the painter’s sensations and emotions that mattered, and every man could recreate painting as he understood it from any basis whatever, then there was no more painting; there were only individuals”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Because even if you are against a movement, you're still part of it. The pro and the con are, after all, two aspects of the same movement. [...] You can't escape your own period. Whether you take sides for or against, you're always inside it.
- Pablo Picasso”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Подавляющее большинство людей лишено способности творить, изобретать. По словам Гегеля, знать они могут только то, что уже знают. Как же учить их чему-то новому? Нужно смешивать известное им с неизвестным. Тогда, смутно завидя в собственном тумане нечто знакомое, они думают: «Ага, вот это я узнаю». Отсюда всего один шаг до «Ага, я узнаю всю вещь целиком». Затем их разум устремляется к неизвестному, они начинают познавать то, чего до сих пор не знали, и развивать свои умственные способности.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“В нашем распоряжении определенное, но неизвестное нам количество переживаний. Как только песочные часы перевернуты, песок начинает высыпаться, и не остановится, пока не высыплется весь. Вот почему я хотел бы остановить его в самом начале. Нам надо делать как можно меньше жестов, произносить как можно меньше слов, даже видеться как можно реже, если это продлит то, что мы имеем. Неизвестно, сколько всего нас ждет впереди, поэтому нужно принимать величайшие предосторожности, дабы не разрушить красоту того, что у нас есть. Все существует в ограниченных количествах — особенно счастье. Возникновение любви где-то предопределено, ее длительность и насыщенность тоже. Если достичь полного накала в первый же день, она в первый же день и окончится. Поэтому если так дорожишь любовью, что хочешь ее продлить, нужно ни в коем случае не предъявлять каких-то чрезмерных требований, которые помешают ей все усиливаться в течение предельно долгого срока.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso

“Pablo bijaše uvijek zaokupljen ljubavnom postojanošću Aragona i Else. Činilo se da naročito s Aragonove strane postoji potpuna odanost, gotovo kult u kome ona bijaše boginja ljubavi. Razgovarao je o tome s Aragonom, kad bi on došao bez Else.
- Kako možeš uvijek voljeti istu ženu?-upita ga Pablo jednog dana- Konačno,ona se mijenja kao i sve drugo i postaje stara.
- Upravo tako-odvrati Aragon. - Ja volim sve te male promjene. One mi gode. A volim i jesen u žene.”
― Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso