"If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"The hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is."
— Eddie Van Halen

"When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. "
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

"A beep on the nose is a sign of great affection"
— Charles Schulz (Peanuts)

"It is a strange
world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and
troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them
all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry
bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all
dance together to the music that he make with that
smileless mouth of him.
Ah, we men and women
are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different
ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes,
they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too
great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the
sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to
go on with our labor, what it may be.’"
— Bram Stoker (Dracula)

"What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

—Vincent van Gogh

"
— Vincent Van Gogh

"Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy"
— Ludwig van Beethoven

"You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living."
— A.E. Van Vogt

"Jump!"
— Van Halen