Talking books

‘Give ‘em what they know, and when you’ve done it once do it again.’

Ex war artist Dick Heldar in Rudyard Kipling’s first novel The light that failed

Talking books

“There’s nothing finer, nothing better in the whole world than a well drawn muscle on a firmly painted limb.”
Artist Claude Lantier in Zola’s The masterpiece

Talking books

“And for ten days and nights I wrenched and slapped and sanded until, with the flood still running through my head, the canvas put the holy fear of God in me, made the bloody hair on my bloody neck stand up on end.”

Artists Butcher Bones describing the production of his McCahon-like painting If you have ever seen a man die in Peter Carey’s Theft: a love story

Talking books

“The collector's enemy is the museum curator.  Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned to circulation.”

Collector Kaspar Utz  in Bruce Chatwin’s book Utz

Talking books

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?”

“Indignation, best fuel I know. Never burns out.”

Michelangelo responds in The agony and the ecstasy by Irving Stone

Talking books

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to paint like – Bernard Tufts. His painting hasn’t developed as much. It’s as if I’m faking Tufts now because I’m painting the same Tufts as I did five years ago! In a way, I have to make more of an effort to be myself than I do to be Derwatt."

Bernard Tufts, artist and forger of Derwatt paintings in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under ground

Talking books

(A new series that quotes fictional artists)

“B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.'

“If you find life a bit dull at home and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bob's worth of roman candles in each pocket. You'd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.”

Artist Gully Jimson in Joyce Cary’s The horse's mouth