We as artists are actively encouraged - by other authors, your agent, publisher, and society - not to think about money, strategy, how to manage your career, how to create a brand, because we're supposed to focus on the art.

The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window.

To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.

To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change

I think it's pretentious to create art just for the sake of stroking the artists ego.

I think that 'City of Heavenly Fire' is definitely a book where all the characters are tested to their limits, and they have to make really significant choices about who they are and who they wanna be.