“When I seek, I look, look, look….”
Benoit Mandelbrot

"Soul is the master,
and matter its natural subject."
Plato

"The Good Earth"

from the collection of Rene & Paul

"Life passes into pages if it passes into anything. I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist."- James Salter

Nick Paumgarten says about Salter- "You come away from his work wondering if you should have lived more, even if living more, in his work, often leads to ruin."

"Marina"

22x16"

"I wanted everything I learned to be an opening into the unknown, whereas Gerry's knowledge added up to a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him."
-Tessa Hadley from her short story Valentine

“The role of the art is to accept that things break down. That’s the only way to get something new to emerge.” Per Kirkeby

"The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself."

Sherwood Anderson

"When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know. What you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
James Baldwin

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
Douglas Adams

"You're not a failure," she told him one day. "No. You're not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You're just unlucky. Like someone... like someone who..." (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she's understood me, I'm not a professional failure!)---"That's it. You're like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You're an explosion still waiting to be heard."
Andrei Makine from The Life of an Unknown Man

Eddie helped paint the porch...

When I get the sense that a new book is beginning, I start a notebook into which I put anything that might seem relevant, which could be a large-scale plot idea, something overheard on the bus, or a descriptive phrase that came to me on a walk. I don't actually start writing that book until out of all this has emerged a pretty clear plan for the whole thing. I can't just start writing and see what happens. Of course improvisation is an important part- I would find it dreadfully boring if I planned everything. What keeps you going are the discoveries you make in the course of writing."

Alan Hollinghurs, from an interview in The Paris Review

"only dead fish follow the stream"

- a Finnish expression

"Workmanship of risk is, generally, the making of anything individually by hand, the creation of a product that is never exactly the same twice...

Because the outcome of workmanship of risk is never certain, the quality of it is determined by the care, dexterity, and judgement of the worker...

from Wooden Boats by Michael Ruhlman

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

John Ruskin

"I never if I can help it get into the specifics of songs and their meanings. If you're a songwriter, and your idea is that your songs are helpful to yourself and others, they sort of operate on this sense of mystery. They don't function if they are explained; it puts out the fire." Ryan Adams in nyt interview 10/11/11

treasures found behind the wall at 2107

"He loathed gentility and social convention. To him they smacked of fakery, like the various artistic symbolisms, Surrealism among them, that modern painting had contrived. The real world, stripped bare, already presented unfathomable strangeness and fascination. An artistic life should exhaust itself trying to unpack it."

Michael Kimmelman about Lucian Freud