No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

More of me comes out when I improvise.

The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.

I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house.

It's (the lack of communication between the people in his paintings, ed.) probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.

To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling.

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house.

Well, I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics.

Some people are worth the world

There is nothing Christ dislikes more than for His people to make a showpiece of Him and not to use Him.

People who don't read fiction are scared of what's inside their own heads.

Yeah, I'm a thrill seeker, but crikey, education's the most important thing.

As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.

No one ever comitted suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

Every human being should always be treated as an end and never as a mere instrument.

I believe that any violation of privacy is nothing good.

My life and his were twisted into a single strand. Cut one, and you cut both. If he were gone, I would not be able to live through that. If I were gone, he wouldn't live through it, either.