Etel Adnan Quotations

Do what your inner soul tells you to do, regardless of any money or success it will bring you.

Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings.

I always had a few people who liked what I did, and that was enough,

I didn't want to read French or write it; it was like a boycott, a rejection.

I love Nicolas de Stael particularly, and my work can remind people of him. But looked at attentively, our works are not similar at all.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

Once I put down a color, I never cover it up. If you are born a musician, why become a banker?

We were taught to think that Paris was the center of the universe.

My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing.

Places are part of nature, of the bigger picture. We are interrelated. When we contemplate them in their own right, they can sometimes change our lives; they can become spiritual experiences.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

To read a lot of trash mixing the blood of war with business’s stench. To root out any happiness. To go out, and down, and on the road. To hesitate; to go on, and ahead, and back, and up the stairs, and in one’s room. On the way, to notice that the mountain is still there. To lie and sleep, deeply, heavily. To reproduce night’s sleep. To wake up, look through the window at green water, from the Bay to the mountain, and return to one’s self. To remember that war is devastating Irak. To feel pain.

Not seeing rivers is also another way of dying.

The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.

There is in Ammiel Alcalay’s work an unabashed tenderness for the world as it is, and that makes him courageous, different.

if you aren't here your heart won't break in the same way.

There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times that someone dies.

I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don’t separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?

I love rains which carry desires to oceans.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.