When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Generalised anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work - though it's not necessarily evident in anything that's finished.

Just going to the Olympics would be a dream come true. I could finish last, and it would still be an amazing experience.

I liked the way they treated the first, second, and third place finishers equally. It was an amazing year. I only entered two song contests this year; I won one and placed second in the other. And I entered each of them a day or two before the deadline.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don't need that question answered.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

"1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

Always finish Well in all you do and when frustrated...slow down and pause, giving the frustrated time to transition back into finishing well, an intentional life cycle we can all choose

Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew right into the web and was trapped there. The spider didn't pay it any attention at first, but went on with what it was doing; only when it was finished did it creep over on its pointy toes and sting that poor mosquito to death. As I sat there on that wooden floor and watched Hatsumomo come reaching for me with her delicate fingers, I knew I was trapped in a web she had spun for me.

I'd always thought I would feel like an animal released from its cage when my student days were finished, I felt more like a bird that had been pushed from its nest and told it must fly.

Marianne touches his elbow, halting him. 'You know I'll tell you something about being married five times. Or married five times and still friends with my surviving ex-husbands'. She counts them on gnarled fingers. 'That would be three'. He waits. 'It teaches you damn all about love.' Paul begins to smile, but she hasn't finished. Her grip on his arm is surprisingly strong. 'What it does teach you, Mr McCafferty, is that there's a whole lot more to life than winning.