The most interesting studio work, and perhaps the most practicable, is painting from pencil sketches and notes... It ensures the elimination of all facts but those essential to the effect.

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.

A terrifying spiritual and moral tide of evil has already loosed us from our spiritual moorings. Monstrous new ideas that could easily destroy our freedoms are rushing into the vacuum.

You know it's right when you feel this undeniable connection and chemistry.

A society without intellectuals is like a body without a head

the Empire State Building was tall. So what? Just proved New York builders didn't know when to stop at a good story.

For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source

A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I'm joking and when I'm serious.

These small things - nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far.

Even a bad idea executed is better than a good idea undone.

If you had seen me back in high school, there's no way you would have ever said I would become an author or teacher because I was a horrible student.

Humans are very good at making algorithms work eventually.