Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

Music is only love looking for words.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

Brazil is bigger than Europe wilder than Africa and weirder than Baffin Land.

I dont believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there but which he has not experienced.

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper or at least not about love.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

I'm inspired by nature. Other artist's work is important for developing my perception.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

What do you say when someone has truly inspired you? How do you express to an artist how deeply their work has affected you?

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

You have to find what makes you stable in the storm. Then, no matter what's happening round you, no matter what the hype or the publicity, you can still manage to make leaps in your work as an artist.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

The most colorful section of a bookstore is the display of SF books, with art by people like Wayne Barlow, who is a terrific artist.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.