photo by Eliot Dudik

If the world were clear, art would not exist.
-Albert Camus

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Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.
-Aldo van Eyck

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Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
-Steve Jobs

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I think my life will run out before my work does.
-Townes Van Zandt

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Participation in an art, at bottom, has nothing to do with earning money.  Participation in an art, although unrewarded by wealth or fame, and as the Middle West has encouraged so many of its youth to discover for themselves so far, is a way to make one’s soul grow.
-Kurt Vonnegut

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…in the long run there results something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind—something that transfigures, something delicate, mad, or divine…
-Friedrich Nietzsche

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There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
-Albert Camus

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An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere.  You always have to realize that you’re constantly in the state of becoming.
-Bob Dylan

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Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them.  Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality.  Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world.  For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.
-Tom Robbins