Saul Steinberg Quotes

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

Chi disegna non deve perdersi d'animo, lasciarsi scoraggiare da un momento di stanchezza o di confusione. Deve insistere, perché la cosa giusta viene solo dopo il momento di disperazione. Invece a volte, appena lo scoraggiamento arriva, si smette, si abbandona il terreno. È un errore.

OTHER PEOPLE It’s hard to accept that other people’s lives are as full and real and now as yours. You look at someone and sort of think, against your intellectual knowing better, that they have a less complex life, they’re able to flit about, their lives aren’t clogged with the same kind of pressing deadlines, they don’t really have cousins like you have cousins, they are free tonight, of course they are free, or if they have plans they can easily break them to be with you. Our lives just feel so impossibly big to us; we’re breathing versions of that Saul Steinberg poster, where New York is in the foreground, prominent and massive and drawn in colored-pencil detail, and the other states and Asia and Africa are tiny lumps fading into the horizon. This egocentric/inner bigness

Stephen Schwarzman, who runs the Blackstone Group and is perhaps the most successful, or show-offy. of the private-equity moguls (he makes $300 million a year or so), celebrated his 60th birthday this winter with a multimillion-dollar party of the era at Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory for 1,500 friends and any celebrity who'd show up. . . More cautious people equated Schwarzman's birthday with the party Saul Steinberg, a financial self-promoter of the 80s, threw for himself in 1989, which marked the high point of that bubble. Even Schwarzman himself was hinting that the end might be near.” Michael Wolff, “Serious Money,” May 2007