“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.”
As quoted in Fodor's New England (2008) by Debbie Harmsen, p. 194
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Norman Rockwell 6
Armatian 1894–1978Related quotes

Interview with Thomas Schelling http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/wpna-ebd606-interview-with-thomas-schelling-1986 (1986).

“I am the teller of the tale, not the creator of the story.”
Attributed

As quoted in Hollywood and After: The Changing Face of Movies in America (1974) by Jerzy Toeplitz, p. 141, and in The Pop Sixties: A Personal and Irreverent Guide (1985) by Andrew J. Edelstein, p. 148.

From his autobiography My Young Years (1973), quoted in Carol Krucoff (August 13, 1982) "FOCUS: With a Little Bit of Good Luck", The Washington Post, p. D5.
The Days of My Life : An Autobiography (1989), p. 212
Context: My first TV series on demonstrations in physics — titled Why Is It So? were now seen and heard over the land. The mail was massive. The academics were a special triumph for me. They charged me with being superficial and trivial. If I had done what they wanted my programs would be as dull as their classes! I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics. Why cloud the charm of a Chladni plate with a Bessel function?

Letter to Lord Godolphin (12 September 1707), from Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 250.

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Praeterita, volume I, chapter IX (1885-1889).
Context: My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,— if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — happier if it needed no help of mine, — this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.