You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.
Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay etc, especially if you haven't sold it yet. And the ones that aren't, you don't want in your life anyway.
People are fond of spouting out the old clich%uFFFD about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is somehow merit in utter failure. Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide.
To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.
The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.
Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.