Art Has No Cosmology, It Gives Us

History Is For Human Self-knowledge. Knowing Yourself Means Knowing, First, What It Is To Be A Person; Secondly, Knowing What It Is To Be The Kind Of Person You Are; And Thirdly, Knowing What It Is To Be The Person You Are And Nobody Else Is. Knowing Yourself Means Knowing What You Can Do; And Since Nobody Knows What They Can Do Until They Try, The Only Clue To What Man Can Do Is What Man Has Done. The Value Of History, Then, Is That It Teaches Us What Man Has Done And Thus What Man Is.

If An Artist May Say Nothing Except What He Has Invented By His Own Sole Efforts, It Stands To Reason He Will Be Poor In Ideas. If He Could Take What He Wants Wherever He Could Find It, As Euripides And Dante And Michelangelo And Shakespeare And Bach Were Free, His Larder Would Always Be Full, And His Cookery Might Be Worth Tasting.

The Sociability Of Artists Is A Paradoxical And Precarious Thing, And Ceases The Instant They Begin Their Actual Artistic Work.

The Romantic Artist Expects People To Ask, 'what Has He Got To Say?' The Classical Artist Expects Them To Ask, 'how Does He Say It?

As A Child Growing Up Among Artists I Learned To Think Of A Picture Not As A Finished Product Exposed For The Admiration Of The Virtuosi, But As The Visible Record, Lying About The House, Of An Attempt To Solve A Definite Problem In Painting.