Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.

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.

A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

We imagine all these postapocalyptic, class-stratified, new-world-order techno-futures. But actually the real world, the world we live in, this is the dystopia.

Just because you painted a house didn't mean the furniture inside was any different. It had to be the same with people.

Yeah, I like to gamble.

I'm scared of everything. I think it's only sensible to be that way.

The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything people tell them.

To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

I have a lot of responsibilities outside myself. I have a large family. I want to know I can always be helpful.