I always keep a pencil handy when my friend John T. Unger is talking.
This bit came from us discussing how my books are the by-products of my process of figuring out how this stuff is done.
Art is much more interesting and makes a lot more sense (at least for the artist, anyways) if you think of the finished works as just the remains — the “fossil record” — of a process of looking, thinking, making, etc. (No more is this on display when we clean up my 4-year-old’s drawings at the end of the day.)
By the way, the reason John is so quotable (I think I’ve quoted him in the past three books) is that in a past life he was a poet. Here is one of my favorite stories of his, which I retold in Show Your Work!:
