It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of pursuing one's passion and creativity each day as life is uncertain.
In this quote, Frank Auerbach expresses the idea that life is fleeting and unpredictable, which makes it essential to engage in one's true passion—painting, in his case—every day. He suggests that choosing not to embrace one's creative calling feels irrational in the face of life's uncertainties, urging individuals to prioritize their passions amid the unpredictability of existence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about following your dreams, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of pursuing one's passion.
To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.
I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
I am the luckiest old broad on two feet if the truth were known. It's - but it all goes back to 'Mary Tyler Moore,' 'Golden Girls,' all those - actors love to take the credit. We couldn't do it without the writers.
In my acting, I have to identify with something in the character. The big tough boy on the side of right - that's me. Simple themes. Same me from the nuances. All I do is sell sincerity and I've been selling the hell out of that ever since I started.
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.
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