Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Divine fires do not blaze each day but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence.

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

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of

If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest . . . she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.