Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint.

I love so many different types of music - hard rock, bebop, jazz fusion, R&B. And I've loved meeting and painting so many amazing artists like Lionel Richie, Ronnie Wood, Sia, Steven Tyler, Swizz Beatz, Taylor Swift, James Moody, The Fifth Dimension, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Michael Jackson. It makes me smile thinking about each one of them.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I saw Frank Frazetta's art, and it seared on my memory. I love his paintings. They're so amazing.

When you go back to the days when I was studying how to paint, some of the things that excited me most was to go into the Huntington Library and Gardens and to see the amazing pictures of the landed gentry.

I had a paint pony called Half-Pint, and I rode her in Madison Square Garden, and that was my first big show. But my first real pony was this red pony called Chantal. He was absolutely amazing. He was a great pony, except he did spin me off a couple of times! I would blink, and then I would be on the floor.

For sheer creativity and totality of involvement, 'Rolf's Cartoon Club' with HTV in Bristol was an amazing show to work on, but I think the 'Rolf on Art' series, culminating in the painting of the Queen's portrait to celebrate her 80th birthday, just nudges into the favourite spot.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Fall in love with the masterpiece, and also the paint on the floor.

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.

I have spent a good many years since?too many, I think?being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

Not everything in life is painted with happy colors because no matter how we love the rainbow, there comes a time that we also crave gray skies and the touch of raindrops.

Build a life worth living. I stare at this phrase on my ceiling every morning before I decide to get out of bed. I painted it a few years ago after completing a few months of dialectal behavioral therapy. It is a quote by Marsha Linehan, who created DBT. After therapy, I impulsively decided to paint it on my ceiling in black, as some sort of reminder to?build a life worth living. I don't regret painting it up there - well, not yet, at least.

You put your dreams on hold all those years thinking there's a white line painted down the middle of every road. Sometimes there's no road at all.

"Paint thinner is the boatyard's morning dew. The stringent smell awakens the mind of a sailor as spring flowers awaken the mind of a poet.

Paint the canvas of your dreams with the blood of your sweat. You are the Picasso of your own life.

We can paint our life with the color of our choice. But there are people who have only one color, they don't have any choice.