Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens.

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.

The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.

People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.

Remember that it is quicker to destroy than build, so be careful of what you do even with your own tongue.

One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.

When you see how the President makes political or policy decisions, you see who he is. The essence of the Presidency is decision-making.

Scheherazade is the classical example of a woman saving her head by using it.

the most common type of pessimism is neither philosophical nor religious: it is the pessimism of thwarted desire. ... It is the cynical sneer of the man who, seeking roses, finds only ashes.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'.

Even on the greatest teams, there's always one role player.

The Pistols were like my work of art. They were my canvas.