Seeing nothing one sees everything.

Dismiss thoughts of 'good, bad, right, wrong, success, failure' - be spontaneous.

The great square has no corners and the great implement completes nothing.

Respond to others about your work with equanimity.

Representational painters: place your works in a larger context. Give your work not only breadth but breath. Do not 'copy' what you see outwardly but give it 'spirit.

Playful arising is authorized by both risk and trust in the process and in oneself. To be truly playful and improvisational one must not look for results.

Painting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary... It is the ordinary resurrections that define your painting.

Allow the brush to 'wander' above the realm of conventional judgement and practice.

Identify in your work opposites of color, form, compositional arrangements, space, etc.

Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired.

Reconcile the loss of the painting - no matter how many times it may happen - with the joy of beginning again.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Sometimes you want to curl up and cry until you can cry no more. But you realize that that would leave you exposed and vulnerable. So you turn, and realize that there is no one to turn to.

Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt.

Everyone should have the right to join a strong union that will always have your back.

Outside the ring of dancing warriors with spears and axes stood wolves at a respectful distance, watching and waiting.

The grace of God is a wind which is always blowing.