This is a collection of quotes from my reading. They follow no particular order and are recorded in my notebooks. I have endevoured to attribute those that I can. Apologies to those authors not identified, your words are important to me.

“Le doute, voilá l'art” - Max Jacob 1953
'The element of doubt which acts as a stimulus towards new achievements becomes a salutary torment from which it is impossible to escape. It eliminates the deadly possibilities of self-satisfaction and sharpens perception and poetic insight.'
Roland Penrose – Miro
Thames and Hudson1988

'Television, controlled by the state and big business, allowed for a new type of colonialism, an inner colonialism whereby the population was duped and controlled, not with weapons but with a glossy, false picture of the world.'
Tony Godfrey – Conceptual Art
Phaidon 1998

' I paint because I have nothing, or I paint because I am full of paint ideas, or I paint because I want a purple picture on my wall, or I paint because after I last painted, something appeared miraculously out of it...something strange, and maybe something strange may happen again.'
Alan Davie (born 1920)

'We have so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellecual coherence, even in poetry(painting), that we find a difficulty in doing without it.'
unknown

'History is a nightmare that I try to wake up from.'
James Joyce

'The surrender to something outside the self is an attempt (whether on a sexual level or some other) to transend one's essential isolation.'
unknown

'It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms'
Man Ray

'Painting is an activity, and the artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than paint what he sees.'
E H Gombrich – Art and Illusion