“Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.”

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

For a first look at someone we may sleep with, or a last look at someone we love.

Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

Drawing need not be the bones of art, but skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment.

Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive.

Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this:

The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.

Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. .

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we’ve missed and can’t name, and out of that wanting – well, everything else rises, good and bad.

Fog and hypocrisy – that is to say, shadow, convention, decency – these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Poetry is a very complex art, It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Rap is really just too conventional. Everybody does the same thing. No one ever pushes the box.

I think it’s ridiculous that you need to look a certain way to be conventionally pretty.

A guy walks into a psychologist’s convention with a banana in his pocket.When asked about the significance of this he says;well,they were all out of grapes.

How crazy it is to define your happiness with hypocrisy-laced conventions? To always go with the flow and not letting the craziness show. Looks like the only sanity is to LET GO.

Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.