When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.

Don't write about what you don't know even if you don't know it.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.