Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she's something sublime that you were born into, some great rugged power that you are a part of.

Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it.... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.

Do not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things with intensity.

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion.

It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw.

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.

So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

There's no point asking dogs about their dreams because sleeping dogs lie.

When your chair is positioned facing the wall, you see the wall. When it is positioned facing the sea, you see the sea. The same is true for us. Perspective is everything. Align with the divine.

You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself

My friends tell me that I've calmed down, that I seem more centered. I don't know, I think my inner self was more hollow before, which made me more scattered, and more needy to get laughs.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

No one can afford to look downward for his enjoyments.

The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.

I have it on good authority-from the roads department chief, Mr. Arpin-that it will not snow after the fifteenth of March.

All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.... Build, therefore, your own world.

A spa hotel? It's like a normal hotel, only in reception there's a picture of a pebble.