Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.
Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.
...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
Directing a film was something I always wanted to do, something that seemed an inevitability in my development as an actor.
Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.
The thing about stories is that they almost always find their way onto the page, even if it takes a while.
I have let half-decades elapse between books because books have to be writte and writing is awful, but if you are the type of person who makes things, there is no profit in worrying about how or why or when the next project will come into being beyond simply acknowledging that it is inevitable that it will be very soon.
I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
