When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .

Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.