Aubrey Beardsley

"All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles."

"I see everything in a grotesque way. When I go to the theatre, for example, things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them — the people on the stage, the footlights, the queer faces and garb of the audience in the boxes and stalls. They all seem weird and strange to me. Things have always impressed me in this way."

"It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician."

"I’m so affected, that even my lungs are affected."

"There was a young man with a salary, Who had to do drawings for Malory; When they asked him for more, He replied, 'Why? Sure You've enough as it is for a gallery.'"

"I shall not live much longer than did Keats."

"What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it."

"I think the title page I drew for Salomé was after all "impossible". You see booksellers couldn't stick it up in their windows."

"Of course, I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing."

"I have always done my sketches, as people would say, for the fun of it... I have worked to amuse myself, and if it has amused the public as well, so much the better for me."

"The general opinion appears to be that it is very funny to make yourself out as fast or as foolish as possible; though even worse than this is the painful orthodoxy of those individuals who claim Shakespeare for their favourite poet, Beethoven for their favourite composer, and Raphael for their favourite painter."

"Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash."

"The poster first of all justified its existence on the grounds of utility, and should it further aspire to beauty of line and colour, may not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries, and the designers of affiches pose proudly in the public eye as the masters of Holland Road or Bond Street Barbizon (and, recollect, no gate money, no catalogue)?"

"What view the bill-sticker and sandwich man take of the subject I have yet to learn. The first is, at least, no bad substitute for a hanging committee, and the clothes of the second are better company than somebody else’s picture, and less obtrusive than a background of stamped magenta paper."

"One’s ears are weary of the voice of the art teacher who sits like the parrot on his perch, learning the jargon of the studios, making but poor copy and calling it criticism. We have had enough of their omniscience, their parade of technical knowledge, and their predilection for the wrong end of the stick."

"The only place in London where one can forget that it is Sunday."

"When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare."

"Pope has more virulence and less vehemence than any of the great satirists. His character of Sporus is the perfection of satirical writing. The very sound of words scarify before the sense strikes."

"How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did — sly dog!"

"His sketches were numerous and so were his mistakes."

"Oscar loved purple and gold, Aubrey put everything down in black and white. And while every connoisseur declared that line of the artist superb, there were others who deplored that he did not know where to draw it."

"I see you have a feeling for draperies, and I suggest you cultivate it."

"Why, you don't know anything about editing. Neither of you, not even with me, can run a magazine."

"He was shy, nervous, and self-conscious, without any of the intellectual assurance and ease so characteristic of him eighteen months later when his success was unquestioned."

"Imitable, Aubrey, imitable, surely."

"Superbly premature as the flowering of his genius was, still he had immense development, and had not sounded his last stop. There were great possibilities in the cavern of his soul, and there is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower."