Paul Schimmel

He knows all about art, but he doesn’t know what he likes.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

All art inspires me. Life inspires me. The art of life, thus my own art.

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

One of the things about creativity is you can be in denial about these things. When I found out I had cancer, there were four hours in which I was pounding my head on the marble kitchen top saying, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.” But then I felt as if this little army in uniform was flooding me. They had come to help me fight it. I felt really strong about it after that. It was one of the strongest periods of my life.

Bad artists imitate, great artists steal.

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

Mother’s taste was eclectic and ranged from the ancient world to the contemporary from Europe to the U.S.

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.