Mark Bradford Quotes

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Dig into life with wild roving abandon, opening your mind to the delicious possibilities that perplex the mind, entice the heart, and excite the spirit.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

When I'm in a place like Iceland, I allow myself to take a little more time to divert off onto other paths creatively for a while and see what comes to me.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

I just think you can't shut your life off to just, you know, one thing. You gotta be open-minded. Explore things. Feed your artist.

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

Kids need stuff which is different than what their life is that they can kind of live through.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Victorville gave me opportunity to go inside and explore my imagination a bit.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

On the road and traveling - that's when people are at their most creative.

I try to be led by my curiosity.

I think that we all absolutely have curiosity. It brings about knowledge. It's energizing. It's spiritually empowering. It makes us more interesting as people.

I look for stories everywhere.

Kids are curious, and if you don't lose that, then everything is an adventure.

I believe in adventure and imagination, and I got that from my parents and the things I experienced as a child.

Growing up, I saw the world as an inspiring place full of interesting people.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

I have been very fortunate to be a part of tours with other artists that have exposed me to new places that I've never been before. Once you discover something beautiful, you just want to keep coming back.

I love to travel. During normal workdays, sometimes it feels like I have to bludgeon ideas out of my soul - but when I'm traveling, relaxed and unpressured, the ideas just spill out.