There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.

If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.

I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.

Zeke's snort sounded suspiciously like laughter. "Allie you're a beautiful, exotic-looking vampire girl with a katana. Trust me, if anyone is going to attract attention, it's not going to be me.

The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

Push me past my limit all you want. It's territory I know well.

Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change. Kindness that catches us by surprise brings out the best in our natures.

If you haven't time to help youngsters find the right way in life, somebody with more time will help them find the wrong way.

I went through a huge transition in my life where everything and everyone I knew and trusted didn't turn out to be that way.

The powers of the Soul are commensurate with its needs.

I feel audiences are not given enough credit for their intelligence.