A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.

Success, for most people, requires unlearning as much as learning.

Every place there's people, there's badness.

A seed today is a forest tomorrow.

Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.

I just want to see around beautiful things. I don't realise how much I miss out on just seeing beautiful scenery.

I unapologetically and unabashedly am deeply biased toward my mother.

When a man sleepes, his head is in his stomach.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?

Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.

It is stupid to tolerate Nikola; all Chekists have to be on alert to shoot anyone who doesn't turn up to work because of Nikola.