However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors.

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as somethingrelated to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannotseparate technique from expression. There is only expression.

I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human consciousness.

Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Because that’s what a comic is, ultimately: a collection of pages. It’s not a flatpanel or a touchscreen, even though that’s where it might eventually be displayed. It’s a page.

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

You are on my side," she says."What side is that?" I ask."The winning side," she says, and smiles. "The team of the artists.""Who are we playing?""The barbarians," she says. "We are always playing them.

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.

You are on my side," she says."What side is that?" I ask."The winning side," she says, and smiles. "The team of the artists.""Who are we playing?""The barbarians," she says. "We are always playing them.

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

I have all the traits of a portrait, and chief among them is the fact that I appear to be lifelike. My nickname in high school was “The Man With A Green Apple For A Nose.” This is not a joke.

Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.

As an artist, if your work doesn't inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance... The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.