Annie Dillard Quotes

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss... whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

Writing and Painting are the same for me.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.

People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

Painting is similar to music. You get a couple or words or notes or chords that excite you, and you just follow them and add a bit more and see where it takes you. That's the thrill for me. It still is a thrill, which is amazing after all this time.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.