The thing is to produce an impression on the readeröthe best you can, the truest you can, but some impression. The newest despisers of form and conventionalization produce no impression at all.

-Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold
  Journal entry,11 Sep.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

-Hardy,Thomas
  Tess of the D'Urbervilles, preface to 5th edn.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before youöa tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streakof yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

-Monet, Claude
Attributed, in reminiscences written in1927 by the young American artist Lilla Cabot Perry.

My first impression is of a slightly bearded spinster: my second isof Willie King madeup like Philip II: my thirdof some thin little bird, peeking, crooked, reserved, violent and timid. 614

-Nicolson, Sir Harold
  On meeting  James  Joyce. Diary entry, 30  Jul.

It's not what's there that counts, it's what's projected öand†it's not what he projects but rather what the voter receives† It's not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression.

-Price, Raymond
  Memo, 28 Nov. Quoted in the NewYorkTimes, 31 Oct1993.

   When I make a portrait,I cannot limit it tothe lines of the head, for that head belongs toa body, it exists ina setting which influences it, it is part of a totality that I cannot suppress. The impression you produce upon me is not thesame if I catchsight of youalone ina gardenor if Isee you in the midst of a group of other people, in a living room or on the street.

-Rosso, Medardo
Quoted in Edmond Claris De l'impressionisme en sculpture, 'Medardo Rosso' (1902).

   One does not walk around a statue any more than one walks around a painting, because one does not walk around a figure to receive an impression from it.Nothing is material in space.

-Rosso, Medardo
Quoted in Edmond Claris De l'impressionisme en sculpture, 'Medardo Rosso' (1902).

If Joan of Arc had been born in Austria and worn a moustache, she might have conveyed much the same impression.

-1st Viscount
  Letter to GeorgeV, referring to his first meeting with Adolf Hitler, 27 Mar. US playwright.  His  plays  and  musicals  include  Barefoot  in  the Park     (1963),     The     Odd     Couple     (1965)     and     the     semi- autobiographical trilogy  Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues  (1984)  and  Broadway  Bound  (1986).  More  recent  works include  Lost  in Yonkers  (1991),  which  won  him  a  Pulitzer  Prize and aTonyAward, and London Suite (1995).

In judging paintings, you should consider whether the first impression pleases the eye and whether the artist has followed the rules; as for the rest, everyone makes some mistakes.

-Tintoretto real name Jacopo Robusti
Quoted in Carlo Ridolfi Life ofTintoretto (1642).

It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces a false impression.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
  Jack.The Importance of Being Earnest, act1.