Norman Rockwell Quotes
"Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller."
“If a picture wasn't going very well, I'd put a puppy in it.”
"Commonplaces never become tiresome. It is we who become tired when we cease to be curious and appreciative."
“I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers … only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.”
"The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be."
"I learned to draw everything except glamorous women. No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking silly ... or like somebody's mother."
"If there was sadness in this creative world of mine, it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems."
"Some folks think I painted Lincoln from life, but I haven't been around that long. Not quite."
“I cannot convince myself that a painting is good unless it is popular. If the public dislikes one of my Post covers, I can’t help disliking it myself.”
Quotes about Norman Rockwell
"Even the most brittle cynics melt in the presence of all that wholesomeness.
They drop the Armani shield, and they rediscover that this is part of our culture."
Robert A. M. Stern
“People like to think that Rockwell painted Middle America. The truth is, Norman Rockwell invented Middle America." Tom Sgouros
"Rockwell taught me how to remember. I clung to the ordinary eccentricity, the clothes, the good-heartedness, the names of things, the comic incongruities, and the oddities of arrangement and light" Dave Hickey
"Rockwell's art mirrors our world - or at least an ideal, slightly lost version of that world . . . . Mom and apple pie are very good institutions, and so was Rockwell's America - despite the presumed shortcomings of its seeming simplifications. Rockwell was really a very fine artist. He captured in ways no one else has how America was, and how a large part of it wants to be." Robert A. M. Stern.