Your rules should arise out of your passions and your experience with what works for you.

Talent, don't bother about wether or not you have it. Just assume that you do, and forget about it. Talent is a word we use after someone has become accomplished.

It often takes two to do a good painting - one to paint it, and another to rap the painter smartly with a hammer before he or she can ruin it.

I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts.

If there is a conflict in your mind between what you know and what you are seeing, paint what you see because if you don't, the result will look like something that isn't there.

Make your art a gift of inspiration to others to work toward better things.

When we are bursting with some wordless experience, Art is our voice, the song of the heart.

What sets you apart from the rest of humanity is your ability to give visual form to an idea - the skill to transform it into something more than merely the insight or perception alone.

Don't wish for "secrets" of the masters, either. There are none worth fooling with. They had no special mediums or paints, nor special brushes that made their work great.

All great art originates from the innocent child within us expressing itself through the wisdom, experience and skill of an adult.

The strength and clarity of the picture you envision at the start will tell you when you are done. You are finished when you have said what you wish to say, when nothing added can make it better.

Bodies lay strewn all around. Turkish and Wallachian warriors caught in the intimate indiscriminate embrace of death.

I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.

I don't think you can really trust a man who likes to dance.

Negative energies can't touch you if you are in a state of meditativeness.

I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom.

I see no reason for giving the capital employed in agriculture greater protection than the capital vested in other branches of trade, manufacture, or commerce.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr, so gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it.

Songs of worship arise from a life of worship.