“Whenever you make a figure of a man or of some graceful animal remember to avoid making it seem wooden; that is it should move with counterpoise and balance in such a way as not to seem a block of wood.”

— Leonardo Da Vinci

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XXIX Precepts of the Painter

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Leonardo Da Vinci 363

Italian Renaissance polymath 1452–1519

John Fowles (1926–2005) British writer

“Since Hedorah was supposed to be a monster created by pollution instead of an animal, I tried to avoid portraying him as an animal. I tried to make him seem spooky and grotesque.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview I" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1993)

“All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Thief

Source: The Thief

“He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Mending Wall (1914)
Context: He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

“To keep it short and simple.... you take the subject, that is for example the wood, and the colour, the paint. You compose the subject, the realistic subject, you make a fantastic shape. For example, here, this is some wood, this is a table with a top and wooden flowers, you know, therefore I paint a [flowery] table, for example..”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

explaining his way of imagination
Karel Appel defines his painting', interview 1968

“If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler!”

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American cognitive scientist

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
Context: If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler! The theory of the roots of equations seemed hard for centuries within its little world of real numbers, but it suddenly seemed simple once Gauss exposed the larger world of so-called complex numbers. Similarly, music should make more sense once seen through listeners' minds.