I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

That I was not suited to commerce or academic study in no way proves that I should also be unfit to be a painter.

I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

At times it is not easy for me to take up living again.

Great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.