My art career actually began under the kitchen table. My mother wanted to get me out of her hair while she cooked, so she laid out some paper and pencils on the floor under the kitchen table.

I live an artistic double life: one of classical realism and the other of aesthetic exploration.

There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.

It is the special privilege of the fine artist to reveal immediate data with a clarity, intensity and purity that promotes them to a special degree of reality.

Every canvas that can awaken us more exquisitely and accurately to the infinite and various surface of our experience does that much to sharpen life, and thereby render it more alive.

I'm not suggesting that you have to overcome your fear of death. But we have to be willing to recognize at any moment, death could come.

It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh, and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.

Technology makes everyone feel old. A laptop is old after two years. Someone always has something newer. Everyone seems to feel obsolete now, even the young.

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.

In music, as I find myself forever saying, things don't get better or worse: they evolve and transform themselves.

I often find that I rock back and forth with a beat in my head constantly. If i stop rocking, it usually means I've hit a snag in my writing.

Spelling is improved when reading is done.

It's funny how when you're up so late at night for so long your mind can get into these creative places, the kind of creative places that come to you when you're halfway between asleep and awake.

Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.

See, what a ready tongue suspicion hath! He that but fears the thing he would not know, Hath, by instinct, knowledge from others' eyes, That what he feared is chanced.