“He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.–--Manet to Monet, on Renoir---”

“Never give up an old tried friend, who has waded through all manner of toil, for your sake, and throw him away because fools may tell you he has some faults.”

“'Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished.'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.'Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see.”

“Love them all," said Renoir. "That is the secret, young man. Love them all." The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. "Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.”

“One boy has it particularly hard. I won't tell you his name. But I will tell you all about him. He has very nice brown hair, and he wears it long with a ponytail. I think he will regret this when he looks back on his life.”

“But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.”