“Couple,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously?  Both are willing to waste effort.  To be hard on himself is one of the main strengths of each.  Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for perfection.  As George Grosz says, “In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.”  The objective is fertile procedure.  Is it not?  Jacob Bronkowski says in the Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering.  In any case it’s not established once and for all; it’s evolving.

Marianne Moore in Writers at Work:  The Paris Review Interviews Second Series  

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