Sherwood Anderson Quotes

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

I go about looking at horses and cattle.

They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.

The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.

Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?.

My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a "sign-writer.

Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.

The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.

The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.

The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.

The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.

Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings. Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.

It is apparent that nations cannot exist for us.

They are the playthings of children, such toys as children break from boredom and weariness. The branch of a tree is my country. My freedom sleeps in a mulberry bush. My country is in the shivering legs of a little lost dog.

What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands. Then you can think of the thing before you.

The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.

Next to occupation is the building up of good taste.

That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.

I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.

Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.

Sometimes I think we Americans are the loneliest people in the world.

To be sure, we hunger for the power of affection, the self-acceptance that gives life. It is the oldest and strongest hunger in the world. But hungering is not enough.

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.

It may be life is only worthwhile at moments. Perhaps that is all we ought to expect.

The lives of people are like young trees in a forest.

They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.

You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man.

“You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.

Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

It is no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.

In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child--something of that sort--gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.

There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.

Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.

There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.

When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.

Friends you have, people you love, die and are born again.

Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.

Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.

When a man publishes a book, there are so many stupid things said that he declares he'll never do it again. The praise is almost always worse than the criticism.

You can make it all right if you will only be satisfied to remain small," I told myself. I had to keep saying it over and over to myself. "Be little. Don't try to be big. Work under the guns. Be a little worm in the fair apple of life.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.

Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about.