You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

You don’t put pressure on me to be something I’m incapable of being. You accept me exactly how I am.

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.

Ooh, I'd love to be in a movie with Meryl Streep or Martin Scorsese. There are so many different things I want to do, maybe like a possessed child or an evil something... I don't know!

I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

Maybe nobody has a right to tell anybody to shut up. Maybe this is how wars get started, because someone tells someone else to shut up, and then no one will apologize.

When obstacles or difficulties arise, the positive thinker takes them as creative opportunities.

Individual success is a myth. No one succeeds all by herself.

There are ways to stimulate being prolific, and part of that is making pilgrimages, and being open to listening, changing up the routine.