I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.

Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way others' expectations can be avoided.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured struggle pain.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

I think people in Botswana are pleased that my books paint a positive picture of their lives and portray the country as being very special. They've made a great success of their country and the people are fed up with the constant reporting of only the problems and poverty of the continent. They welcome something which puts the positive side.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings I see only science.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

It all has to do with art - writing painting things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs but they're always poems first.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.

I love painting and music of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

American poetry like American painting is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

I work on words mostly toward them being poetry or short stories and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks.

I always pet a dog with my left hand because if he bit me I'd still have my right hand to paint with.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

The business of peace requires more than showing up with paint brushes foodstuffs and an oil pipeline or two.

Unfortunately after Sept. 11 there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.