"For me, however, the greatest pleasure is to overcome some difficulty, to find or invent something while I work. I begin by posing myself a problem. But I don't wish merely to solve this problem. While I solve it, I want to find something else, I want to stumble across something that prods me into unknown territory. Out of boredom or the need to entertain myself, I end up discovering something that gives me pleasure.

This kind of work seems to develop me, to educate me, while painting landscapes is another matter entirely. There I enter into a much more sensual state of the soul, in which I have the satisfaction of finding exactly what I already know. Many painters surrender themselves to this sensual pleasure- it allows them to duplicate the things they already know, and they think it's a marvel that all these creations are ultimately recognizable as their own work.

It's a little bit like fairy tales, which end exactly the same way they did the last time we heard them."

Saul Steinberg

"... grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I'd be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I'm nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life."

Louise Erdrich in The Paris Review

found at the edge of the harbor in baltimore...

“Grant mystery it‘s eternal validity and rather than solving it, look for ways to contemplate it and give it honor.”

Thomas Moore

Blizzard Park

22x16"

"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly."
from Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

"Mr. Neuberger bought all his works himself, usually through dealers. And his taste ran toward the bold. “I liked adventuresome work that I often didn’t understand,” he told The Times as he was celebrating his 100th birthday. “For art to be very good it has to be over your head.”

from the NYT obit for Roy R. Neuberger

"I don’t distort. I comment honestly and make pictures of my perceptions. The celebrity is but a person to me. I see them within the primary moment. I try not to have previous assumptions. Each moment is the only moment that we have. We have to enter it without prejudice and with the thought that it may be the last one. The photograph is an attempt to give the perception of the moment some relationship to immortality."

from an interview with Larry Fink in the NYT