All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

Do whatever you do intensely.

The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.

Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.

Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.

The exchange rate for ideas is infinite.

People are fond of saying this or that "changed my life." What they mean is something influenced their life. Only Jesus Christ--or WITSEC--can really change a life.

I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing.

Why hurry over beautiful things? Why not linger and enjoy them?

I just never saw my mother in any other room but the kitchen. There were always pots going.

American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.

Many television weather-women were one abusive parent away from prostitution.

I wanted to make sure that I was making films about the world. So I thought well, I should go and see it. I'm spending a lot of time in - we call them caravans in Britain.

I miss my wife's cooking - as often as I can.

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.