“Recently, I’ve been thinking about talent versus skill. I wonder how much we are born with, and how much we develop our skills along the way. Is talent a mystery embedded in our DNA, or is it a skill that one develops and sharpens with hours upon hours of practice?”

“This, in a nutshell, is the universal problem of artists—artists are too often ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’—unless they’re dead.  They are judged for creating art to please themselves, but if they create art to please other people, they aren’t original anymore. Artists are critiqued and judged by everyone, because it is the nature of an artist to be judged. That’s what they do. They create masterpieces out of nothing—but at the end of the day, the people decide whether a masterpiece has merit or not. The people who ‘get it' love them. The people who don’t understand feel uncomfortable. And at the end of the day, people live and die along with their opinions, while great art lives forever.”