“The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.”

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

if you watch him closely, his mouth is gonna curl to the expression that he’s drawing.

When you live from freelance check to freelance check, your mind is always on “What’s the next piece I’m going to write, or draw, that’ll pay this month’s rent?” And so going out to play ball with my kids was a low priority.

Magic. I draw with silver and it turns red.

I draw strength from spirit, from the divine light. I draw strength from the love my sister and I have for each other, from my nieces,

the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.

He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him.

The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort.

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.