To procrastinate obedience is to disobey God.
What you work hardest at, you love the most.
If you know the differences between an oak and a poplar, a spruce and a pine, down to the needles. . . you are able to paint that tree with more conviction, even if done with a few broad strokes.
Art is the space between the viewer and the rectangle that hangs on the wall. Unless something of the person that created the work is there, there's nothing for the viewer to take away.
The transition from painter to artist comes when you cross the line of painting what you see to painting what you feel about what you see.
It benefits all artists to help one another - it raises the whole profession.
If everything that you do is for the market, it won't work.
There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.
I think that at the start of a game, you're always playing to win, and then maybe if you're ahead late in the game, you start playing not to lose. The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.
When work seems like a job, I don't do it anymore.
There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.