non nobis solum nati That’s a quote from Cicero’s On Duties, which he seemingly got from Plato. It basically means we’re created for the sake of others, to benefit each other as much as possible, from the Stoic ideal of giving and receiving kindnesses...

I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing,

“It has nothing to do with me.”  “But it must hurt you?”  “Why would it? It has nothing to do with me.” That’s a back and forth the writer and academic Umberto Eco had when being interviewed about critics and criticism,

Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. So that’s supposed to be a quote from George Bernard Shaw. I don’t know where I came across it first but it has a Wildean way about it that I’ve found  hard to get out of m...

I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art. Because people don’t understand it. Writers don’t know what to do with it. They’re scared of it, so they ignore it. But if there’s going to be any universal consciousness-raising,

Whenever there is inspiration, which translates as “in spirit,” and enthusiasm, which means “in God,” there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of. That’s a quote I’ve often repeated to people from the German au...

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. That’s a quote from Albert Einstein’s book The World As I See It.

What worked for you on Tuesday will work on Thursday, a claim that cannot always be made when what you hold in your hand is a paintbrush or a camera or a pen. What was exactly right for your last painting will be completely wrong for this one.

When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.