It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at ...
It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's hap...
The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Good art...
What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.
Once the subject matter of rock n' roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, 'Oh, that's what they're doing. That's kind of - that'...
I'm normal. I just had a different occupation for a while, and when you're in a different occupation, you have to carry yourself a different way. Most of my art is me bringing you stories from that era of my life. My life now is kind of boring.
I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everythi...
Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just w...
Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do, and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do.
The relationship between art and a job is not quite linear, but I really love any and all manifestations of art, really respect any kind of artistic impulse, whether it's paintings and sculptures or really good filmmaking or music. I really see the r...
I sort of always had an inkling towards some kind of an art form. I grew up in a very small town, and I just figure-skated. My dad played hockey and I was surrounded by sports, but it wasn't quite doing it for me. I wasn't totally fulfilled, and I di...
One often forgets that even if art is a very successful field in contemporary culture, there are still a lot of people alienated by it. Even if people don't fully understand where my work is coming from, at least there's somebody who looks kind of sa...
I put a basketball hoop in the trees, to help the squirrels and give them a nice net to store their nuts for the winter. But that’s just the kind of thoughtful guy I am.
People who believe they have bad luck create bad luck. Those who believe they are very fortunate, that the world is a generous place filled with trustworthy people, live in exactly that kind of world.
I thought the assassin was moving kind of slow for an assassin. Maybe the magic had done something after all. Or maybe he felt sorry for me. That sort of thing happens among cutthroats more often than you'd expect.
If we suppose that mankind never can or will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all.
The boy thought, How powerful a story is, and how by a kind of magic it compels the imagination; there was nothing in the world, it seemed to him, so mysteriously strong; and he began to wonder if he would ever have anything as beautiful to tell.
The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be...
We wonder why we don't have faith; the answer is, faith is confidence in the character of God and if we don't know what kind of God God is, we can't have faith.
Then an odd thing happened. Britney put her finger on the ridge of the painted glass and rubbed it. It made a perfect noise. The kind of noise that goes on and on as a beautiful noise does once it has wrung the ear. It was the chord of the wild sea.
There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)