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Quote by Kenneth Leslie

“Remember that although technique is important, there are other issues in art making that should take precedence. When the strongest thing in an artwork is technique, the subject is vanity. Art must have a higher subject. Something else must rise to the top. A work of art is born in the desire for something—to explore something, be it formal (understanding light, color, or objects in space), political, or emotional. The creative act takes in everything about you—the images and creative means of who you are and where you come from, added to the world you see and hope for. The technique you learn should always be in the service of this.”

Quote by Kenneth Leslie

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Kenneth Leslie

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“This is not a how-to book. It is a how-to-think-about-how-to book. In it I bombard you with images and metaphors with never a photograph or diagram in sight. Your mind's eye will create all the images in this text, and each mind is unique. Getting these, and other images, down on paper will provide you with fun, frustration, joy and despair. Like life,”

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Book:The Mind's Eye: An Introduction to Making Images
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“I bet it was also the triumphant Aha! and not the truth itself that had fueled all those famous literary detectives I knew not much about except their names - Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Joe and Frank Hardy. I felt like yelling something celebratory on my way home, something like, Yeah! or Fuck, yeah! just like Marlowe would have yelled, just like the Hardys would have yelled, and maybe Holmes, too, although maybe that's why he kept Watson around; to tell Holmes to simmer down and not get too far ahead of himself.”

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Book:An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
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“Suddenly, far off at sea, I perceived a black speck on the steel-gray ocean. I turned at once and my heart began to beat wildly. When I forced myself to look, the black speck had disappeared. I was on the point of shouting, of stupidly calling for help, when I saw it again. It was one of those bits of refuse that ships leave behind them. Yet I had not been able to endure watching it; for I had thought at once of a drowning person. Then I realized, as calmly as you resign yourself to the idea the truth of which you have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short where lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here, too, by the way, aren't we on the water? On this flat, monotonous, interminable water whose limits are indistinguishable from those of the land? Is it credible that we shall ever reach Amsterdam? We shall never get out of this immense holy-water font. Listen. Don't you hear the cries of invisible gulls? If they are crying in our direction, to what are they calling us? But they are the same gulls that were crying, that were already calling over the Atlantic the day I realized definitively that I was not cured, that I was still cornered and that I had to make shift with it. Ended the glorious life, but ended also the frenzy and the convulsions. I had to submit and admit my guilt. I had to live in the little-ease.”

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Book:The fall
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