I'm always surrounded by smart talented people. I had talented partners. Stan Latham for one. Talent scouts.
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
It was very easy for me to dedicate myself to the care of mothers, help them have healthy babies, help them be healthy, help them in a place where they don't have opportunities. Success breeds the excitement to continue going. It's harder to get out of bed when you've failed.
An artist of understanding and experience can show more of his great power and art in small things roughly and rudely done, than many another in a great work. A man may often draw something with his pen on a half sheet of paper in one day. . . . and it shall be fuller of art and better than another's great work whereon he hath spent a whole year's careful labor.
Compassion and empathy are not the same as feeling sorry for oneself. They are emotions that extend our perceptual ranges.
A few people have come back to me and said, "Thanks for giving me nightmares for the last few nights!" I say to them, "Well, now you know what I've been going through for the last three years!"