“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” With so many quotes attributed to Picasso, it’s hard to track down where they actually came from, or whether they were even said at all.

In 1923, Picasso talked about cubism with an American critic named Marius de Zayas. The discussion was translated (with his approval) and published as “Picasso Speaks,” in The Arts. What Picasso is really talking about is cubism, and how much he’s not into “research” when it comes to painting. Here’s part of it:

When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

We all know that Art is not truth. 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 re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.

Read the excerpt here and a little more here.

I’ve never read any of David McCullough’s books (something I’ll change soon) but I’ve read this interview twice now, and it’s just great, especially because McCullough mentions that it was a Paris Review interview with Thornton Wilder that changed his own writing life:

I can’t tell you what a difference it made for me. When asked why he wrote books and plays, he said, “I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading or to see a new play that would engross me.” If it didn’t exist, he wrote it so he could read it or see it.

So many good bits. On the importance of looking and seeing:

[S]eeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.” […] The chances of finding [something new] are fairly remote… it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough. […] The training I had in drawing and painting has been of great benefit. Drawing is learning to see and so is writing.

On slowing down and writing with a typewriter:

I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don’t want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower.

About quitting writing his Picasso biography, and the importance of picking a good subject:

I didn’t like him… He was an awful man. I don’t think you have to love your subject—initially you shouldn’t—but it’s like picking a roommate. After all you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?

Terrific read.