Thomas Steinbeck

I would hardly say that I have a rich knowledge of anything in particular, but I do seem to be burdened with an unseemly appetite for intellectual and artistic erudition, which, for the sake of balance, I keep well harnessed to a reliable sense of the absurd.

It's funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.