This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity,...

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of...

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be...

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it...

The art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.”(Last words, according to Dickens’s obituary in The Times.)

Never stop doing your best just because one person doesn’t give you credit.

I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the...

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste...

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it’s a product of an assembly line.

People in coats and ties were milling around the Talley gallery, and on the wall were the minimally rendered still lifes by Giorgio Morandi, most of them no bigger than a tea tray. Their thin...

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.

I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist.

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother’s old blue Camaro car and the smell of...

When people communicate deceit, it’s called politics. When people communicate honesty, it’s called art.

I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the...

They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young...

It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere.

More of me comes out when I improvise.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(“Literature, Revolution, and Entropy”)

We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know – for comedians are the caricatures among us.

Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.

One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more...

What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?

My experience with life is that it’s very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some...

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Good humor isn’t a trait of character; it is an art which requires practice

My art hid the fact that it was art, it was so real.

Art cannot save anybody from anything.

Drawing on my past experiences, I used a lot of erasers. My aging wisdom is starting to look a lot like a nude portrait of Alice Neel.

However,” he continued, “this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors.

It’s an art to live with pain…mix the light into gray.

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art...

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the ‘standpoint of art’ can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology… gives the...

A day is too precious a treasure to forfeit.

Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but...

Rembrandt painted portraits, The Karate Kid painted fences, and I paint my toenails. But I’m not a snob, I still consider those other two guys to be artists.

Good art is like a sexy pair of lips—it has the potential to say so much, but prefers to have you do all the talking about it. Also, good art is fun to kiss and...

Art books are filled with interesting images. And that’s cool and all, but I look more for the nudes.

When searching for a missing person, I’ll canvas the area. Like a painter. I make love like Bob Ross, only your happy tree is happier, and I’ll keep your coffee warm—in my stomach.

Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye….

If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer … I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and...

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.