"This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall 
express myself as I am." -- James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young 
Man 

"So Matisse did not paint in vain...He was once in a post office in Picardy. 
He was waiting to pick up the phone. He picked up a telegraph form lying on 
the table and, without thinking, began to draw a woman's head. All the time 
he talked on the phone, he was drawing. And when at the end, he looked down, 
he had drawn his mother's face. His hand did the work, not the brain. And he 
said the result was truer and more beautiful than anything that came as an 
effort of will."--David Hare, The Bay at Nice