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Appearances are often deceiving. (Aesop)
If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image. (Francis Bacon)
-on Salvador Dali...
All in Dali is indeed contrived, a brilliant illustration of his own psyche as he understands it, as opposed to how it truly may have been. (Sister Wendy Beckett)
The easiest person to deceive is one's self. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
It's better to get something worthwhile done using deception than to fail to get something worthwhile done using truth. (Carlos Castaneda)
-The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic. (G. K. Chesterton)
Art is the most beautiful of all lies. (Claude Debussy)
'Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means. (Edgar Degas)
A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime. (Edgar Degas)
In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false. (Edgar Degas)
It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown. (Anatole France)
The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is. (Kahlil Gibran)
-on John James Audubon...
Audubon biographers and scholars [have noted], by various euphemisms, that all great men have their flaws, and their man's principal flaw was that he, well, he lied a lot. (Bil Gilbert)
Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable – they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims. (Sydney J. Harris)
He who knows a thousand works of art knows a thousand frauds. (Horace)
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist. (Max Jacob)
Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep. (Samuel Johnson)
We are in the business of telling lies. Pull a good swindle. (Robert Levers)
You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time. (Abraham Lincoln)
The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost. (Henri Matisse)
When a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. (Herman Melville)
What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterwards appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not. (Michelangelo)
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception. (Robert Motherwell)
It can't look like you've worked hard and long, even if you have. A painting should be done quickly with both your intellect and your nerves. When they give out, stop. (Charles Movalli)
What is acting but lying and what is good acting but convincing lying? (Sir Laurence Olivier)
Art lies by its own artifice. (Ovid)
First appearance deceives many. (Ovid)
Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth. (Pablo Picasso)
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and researched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything. (Pablo Picasso)
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant. (Plato)
The height of art is to conceal art. (Quintilian)
If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art... the minute painter would be more apt to succeed. But it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
False face must hide what the false heart doth know. (William Shakespeare)
We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. (Rabindranath Tagore)
When you meet triumph or disaster, treat these imposters alike. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. (James Thurber)
They [people] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly... Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then. (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec)
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian. (John Updike)
Deceit... is what art does best. (Meyer Vaisman)
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. (Leonardo da Vinci)
-on Van Gogh's severed ear...
Paul Gauguin may have done it... the weight of evidence... is overwhelming. Everything we know about what happened is from Gauguin. But Gauguin was an inveterate liar. He was also armed. (Rita Wildegans)
My pencil is like a fencer's foil. (Andrew Wyeth)
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