To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

Everything you can imagine is real.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Remember me, even if it's only in a corner and secretly. Don't let me go.

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

Without my voice and spirit I am dust. This is not what I want, but what I must.

I don't believe we can get very far, with leaders who write off half the nation as a bunch of victims who never take responsibility for their own lives.

Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword.

I got into cooking and I went and cooked in Italy. I became a doula for a while. I built stone walls one summer, and I read a lot, and I swam a lot, and I spent a lot of time thinking.

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

I just loved to play. I liked to study the other ballplayers. I could talk about it for ages, because I played professional ball for 20 years, and I was still learning when I quit.

My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come.

One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.