Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word

... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.