“Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.”

The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life.

It is not about painting life, it is about making the painting alive.

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

Nature is the best instructor.

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.

It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration.

With a painter’s temperament, all that’s needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique – all these are in the middle.

Pleasure must be found in study.

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one’s own strength makes one modest.

I saw love in your smile and I recognized it for the first time in my life. But you had a plane to catch and I was already home.

I have this eerie feeling that by the time I’m 33, reality will not exist in the same plane as it did before.

I always woke up before the plane landed.

I don’t know where hell is … another dimension, perhaps, or another plane of reality.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Wake up, Carolee, the plane is waiting for us, we have to get to the game.

Reached only by boat, seaplane and, with less surety, telephone-this is Fire Island.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.