The important thing is to keep on drawing when you start to paint. Never graduate from drawing.

Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Artists are the only people in the world who really live. The others have to hope for heaven.

Art is the response of the living to life. It is therefore the record left behind by civilization.

The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.

Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

I feared my own kind more than anything the natural world could ever threaten me with.

Every morningI wake up with the newsof bloodshed.I feel my body, desperate to know whetherI’m still alive.

To learn true humility, we need more than a redefinition of greatness; we need even more than Jesus' personal example of humble service. What we need is His death.

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

The moment you put a mental label on another human being, you can no longer truly relate to that person. . . It then becomes possible to perpetrate any act of violence.

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

Heaven no longer exists, nor does the earth.

I go in the butchers and there's not a lot of meat I can eat these days, with having all the animals.

We've had several cats. I had a cat when I was a kid. My Aunt had lots of cats and I got lots of calls about cats.