There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.

A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.

It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor.

Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.

The biographical novel sets out to document this truth, for character is plot, character development is action, and character fulfillment is resolution.