Talent may get someone off the starting blocks faster, but without a sense of direction or a goal to strive for, it won't count for much

Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.

The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.

Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work.

To the artist, all problems of art appear uniquely personal. Well, that's understandable enough, given that not many other activities routinely call one's basic self-worth into question.

Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art

Something about making art has to do with overcoming things, giving us a clear opportunity for doing things in ways we have always known we should do them.

Lesson for the day: vision is always ahead of execution - and it should be.

Tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.

The hardest part of art-making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done-over and over-and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.

We have to construct communities of artists because they don't naturally exist in our culture.

A gentleman is not a pot.

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.

It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.

If, unable to solve the mysteries of Providence, we plunge into Atheism, we only increase a thousand fold the darkness by which we are surrounded

Two things make smart men stupid, beautiful women and sports

Relationships are monuments build on lies

You could be my son. You even look like me a little bit... Say, who's your mother?

Senator Kerry has been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue.

I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.