That’s quite all right,” I said. Sfumato, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux.

For me, a paint brush is the only tool I use extensively in my works, to push paint on canvas and conduct melodies. And that's exactly what Garden Avenue is, and all of my projects after that.

Rather than feeling that every moment you’ve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

("It's crazy," she'd said, "but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.")

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.(from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')

Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek. Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit. This is Expressionism.

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

When searching for a missing person, I’ll canvas the area. Like a painter. I make love like Bob Ross, only your happy tree is happier, and I’ll keep your coffee warm—in my stomach.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.

Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence - the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.

And I bet it's harder than people think, isn't it? Everything looks so simple from a distance. Then, the more you look, the more you see. And that's when you have to rise to the challenge.