The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Art is an experience, not an object.

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

The main thing is not to be dead.

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

The sun rises each morning to shed light on the things we may have overlooked the day before.

When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.

I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me.

Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system. I have never known a man who died from over work, but many who died from doubt.

The only way to do something interesting is not care if you fail.

If you think that the people of the Soviet Union have any desire themselves, and moreover, by force, to alter the face of surrounding states, then you are badly mistaken.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

A higher standard of living also brings about a higher standard of culture and civilization.

The Greatest Weapon Used Against the Negro is Disorganization.

I will hate the man you choose because he is not me, and love him if he makes you smile. No woman deserves the sure knowledge of widow’s black as her brideprice, you least of all.