“Limitations are really good for you. They are a stimulant. If you were told to make a drawing of a tulip using five lines, or one using a hundred, you’d have to be more inventive with the five. After all, drawing in itself is always a limitation. It’s black and white, or line or not line, charcoal, pencil, pen. You might have a bit of color—but if you can use only three colors, you’ve got to make them look whatever color you want. What did Picasso say? ‘If you haven’t got any red, use blue.’ Make blue look like red.”

David Hockney

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“One thing I know about color is that it usually doesn’t work straight out of the paint tube.”

Charley Harper

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“I wear black because I’m comfortable in it. But then in the summertime when it’s hot I’m comfortable in light blue.”

Johnny Cash

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“All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.”

Ray Bradbury

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“I’m still an old-fashioned painter. Maybe in a few years when I’m too old, I’ll need help, but what am I going to do, say to an assistant, put the yellow there?”

Ellsworth Kelly

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“If you look at Seurat, most of the dots in the grass are green, the generic color of that area. The other colors only modify that color. I feel less kinship to Seurat than I do to Byzantine mosaics, where an image is built out of discreet incremental marks—chunks of stone or glass—that fit together. I want people to see what made the image. I like dropping crumbs along the trail like Hansel and Gretel. That’s what all these paintings are about.”

Chuck Close

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“It is getting warmer all the time and I have been swimming almost every morning—except for two marvelous stormy days. Today the sea is like pale blue satin, with a mauve haze—huge freighters and tankers coming in slowly through the haze, like ghosts—lovely.”

Elizabeth Bishop

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“Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon—incredibly excellent topaz & ruby at 4 o’clock, cold & shabby at 6.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Rose, where did you get that red?”

Desiree Lynne Collier

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“My garden is all covered up by snow; picked gilliflower Tuesday, now gilliflowers are asleep. The hills take off their purple frocks, and dress in long white nightgowns.”

Emily Dickinson

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“The sky was peach and gold, a teacup of a morning, just enough clouds so as not to mock us.”

Elizabeth McCracken

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“Everybody loves music. What you really want is for music to love you. And that’s the way I saw it was with Keith [Richards]. It takes a certain amount of respect for the process. You’re not writing it, it’s writing you. You’re its flute or its trumpet; you’re it’s strings. That’s real obvious around Keith. He’s like a frying pan made from one piece of metal. He can heat it up really high and it won’t crack, it just changes color.”

Tom Waits

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“My overcoat is so dreary that I know maman would never have tolerated the black or gray scarf I always wear with it, and I keep hearing her voice telling me to wear a little color.
        For the first time, then, I decide to wear a colored scarf (Scotch plaid).”

Roland Barthes

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“I turned sixty-nine on June 10th, ’84. On that day Alexandra said she was divorcing me. She moved out of the apartment then and there. Not before she had applied circular stickers, big ones, green and white, to her possessions and mine. Even bathrobes and carpet slippers carried these gummed labels, a weird snowfall of large round green and white flakes.”

Saul Bellow

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“The sky above us was going from musky yellow to purple. Colors of a cut plum, Mother said.”

Mary Karr

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