The deserving are not always blest. That peculiar attribute known as personality is as potent a factor as genius.

The importance of colour is as nothing compared with that of form, chiaroscuro and arrangement. They are the true and enduring bases of pictorial art.

Rhythm is as necessary in a picture as pigment; it is as much a part of painting as of music.

Style is instinctive and few achieve it in a notable degree. Its development is not hastened by instruction. It comes or it doesn't. It will take care of itself.

Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.

Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.

It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement.

Many cherish the idea that a photograph is an exact presentment of nature, and accept without question the paradox that a photograph cannot lie. Actually there never was a more unmitigated liar.

Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence.

Do not think me fussy when I specify tidiness. It is essential... In printing, remember that cleanliness and order wait upon success.

The rewards of art are not always commensurate with its quality. It affords a precarious living.

Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.

It is the conquest of this fear that adds half the charm to climbing.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

Whatever that ["transfiguration" by Bob Dylan] means, it's true that the poetic brilliance of the early career would never really reappear.

If you do not do the thing you fear, the fear controls your life.

I'm an appalling cook. I can just about create a glass of orange juice and a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

Some people use half their ingenuity to get into debt, and the other half to avoid paying it.

If you pay attention to good critics, you have to listen to the bad. So you have to ignore them all really. You can't just cherry pick the glowing ones.