the beauty of the creative gesture is wild, unwilling and painful.

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it {whatever it is} until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of...

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and...

Clothes and accessories were a person's creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting.

Cooking is more than an art; it is a gift. Genius, and genius alone, can prepare a feast fit for the feaster.

Perhaps art is an eye problem…

Our thinking is a constant abstraction, a turning away of the gaze from the senses, an attempt to construct a purely spiritual world. Yet you favor precisely what is most unstable and mortal, and...

Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility. . . . Story is an affirmation of...

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko's hovering panels or Barnett Newman's stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure...

The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt's dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins' oars, rising and falling,...

Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to...

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and...

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the...

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of...

. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste {those who do not laugh}. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men...

Twenty years earlier, in a life {Kirsten} mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had...

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and...

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more...

A writer or any artist can't expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep...