“I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.”

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

I call people rich when they’re able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

I was an artist, I was executive producer on my first album, so I’ve always had to manage both. I couldn’t get a record deal. It wasn’t by choice – I couldn’t get a record deal, so I had to figure it out.

We all have our individual artistic temperaments as well as partisanships in creative directions. And we have strong opinions on the merits of the products of our occupation.

When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.

Artistic vision comes from a mind clear enough to fall in love with what we see.

Artistic vision is having the clarity to fall in love with what you see.

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.