"The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. .I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose." -- Vincent Van Gogh

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage." -- Sydney Smith

"The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but courts the most promising source of novelty in his own thought... The creative person is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, crazier and saner, than the average person." -- Frank Barron (pioneer in the psychology of creativity, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, born 1922 - died 2002. He was one of the first to study how creative writers, architects, research scientists and mathematicians think.)

"If you don't follow through on your creative ideas, someone else will pick them up and use them. .When you get an idea of this sort, you should jump in with both feet, not just stick your toe in the water ... Be daring, be fearless and don't be afraid that somebody is going to criticize you or laugh at you. .If your ego is not involved no one can hurt you." -- Guru R.H.H.

"Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence." -- Norman Podhoretz

"Every artist was first an amateur." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

".....In such a community as, say, our modern New York, London, or Paris, the artist who would be known has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places. They have not been quite enough engaged in the agony of solitary creative work to press beyond their first acquisitions of marketable styles and techniques. .And the next consequence is 'instant art,' where some clever individual with as little formal agony as possible simply renders something unforeseen -- which is then criticized and either advertised or suppressed by either friendly or unfriendly newspaper folks, who have also had a lot of socializing to attend to and, with insufficient time for extracurricular study or experience, find themselves baffled before anything really complex or significantly new." -- Joseph Campbell in "The Importance of Rites" in his book: Myths to Live By, Bantam Books, 1972.

".....Of course, as everybody knows who has ever played at games, the ones that are the most fun - to lose as well as to win - are the ones that are the hardest, with the most complicated, even dangerous, tasks to accomplish. .And so it is that artists are generally not content, either in the Orient or in the Occident, with doing merely simple things - and much soon becomes simple for an artist that for the rest of us would be difficult. .The artist seeks the challenge, the difficult thing to do; for his basic approach to life is not of work but of play."-- Joseph Campbell in "The Inspiration of Oriental Art" in his book: Myths to Live By, Bantam Books, 1972.

"Up to the age of ten (provided of course that his teachers don't interfere) practically every child paints like a genius." -- Aldous Huxley in his book: On Art & Artists, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York, 1960.

"Remember, if you lose your vulnerability to being hurt by criticism, you lose the very vulnerability that makes you able to be an artist." -- Quote by actress Julianna McCarthy in introduction to the book: The Artist's Way, G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, original copyright 1992.

"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity." -- Alberto Giacometti

"Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth." -- Pablo Picasso

"Painting is freedom. .If you jump, you might fall on the wrong side of the rope. .But if you're not willing to take the risk of breaking your neck, what good is it? .You don't jump at all. .You have to wake people up. .To revolutionize their way of identifying things. You've got to create images they won't accept. .Force them to understand that they're living in a pretty queer world. .A world that's not reassuring. .A world that's not what they think it is." -- Pablo Picasso - from book: Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, by Norman Mailer, Warner Books, NY, 1996.

"Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself." -- Samuel Butler

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