My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.