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The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.
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If you think of dramaturgy in North America, which is so realistic and so literal sometimes, sometimes what theaters - especially dramaturgs - ask for is more information, which sometimes can really weigh down a play. There's only so much information a play can have. If you start putting in so much information, it becomes something completely different, it doesn't sing.
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The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing.
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The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them.
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The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.
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The protagonist of folktale is always, and intensely, a young person moving through ordeals into adult life. . . . and this is why there are no wicked stepchildren in the tales.
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Painting completed my life.
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I have spent far too many years trying to make everybody like me. It's not possible. People can say or think what they want.
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Because there was just one thing that I had to believe to be able to live - I had to know that he existed. That was all. Everything else I could endure. So long as he existed.
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Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.
