Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a way of being.

In this twentieth century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience.

Merely looking at the world around us is immensely different from seeing it.

It is in order to really see, to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call 'The Ten Thousand Things' around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.

The local painters were my idols...These artists, too, were grown-ups, but they were grown-ups who could still see! Their eye was still in love! Like mine!

For you can look at things while talking or with a radio going full blast, but you can see only when the chatter stops.

Enlightenment is simply sanity~ the sanity in which I see my real situation in the living fabric of all that exists.