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

Sherwood Anderson

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Sherwood Anderson
Age: 64 †
Born: 1876
Born: September 13
Died: 1941
Died: March 8
Novelist
Writer
Buck Fever
Salable
Pictures
Object
Save
Objects
Art
Make

More quotes by Sherwood Anderson

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I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
Sherwood Anderson
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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.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am a little thing, a tiny little thing on the vast prairies. I know nothing. My mouth is dirty. I cannot tell what I want. My feet are sunk in the black swampy land, but I am a lover. I love life. In the end love shall save me.
Sherwood Anderson
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Realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
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It may be true of all relationships, not only between fathers and sons, but between men and women. Nothing seems fixed. Everything is always changing. We seem to have very little control over our emotional life.
Sherwood Anderson
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I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.
Sherwood Anderson
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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.
Sherwood Anderson
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As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.
Sherwood Anderson
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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.
Sherwood Anderson
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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.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson
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Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. 'The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two.
Sherwood Anderson
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If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
Sherwood Anderson
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Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
Sherwood Anderson
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I am pregnant with song. My body aches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away. I will tear them into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full of dark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets.
Sherwood Anderson
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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?
Sherwood Anderson
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You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.
Sherwood Anderson
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Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything.
Sherwood Anderson
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I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.
Sherwood Anderson
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The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
Sherwood Anderson