“You have a masterpiece inside you, you know. One unlike any that has ever been created, or ever will be. If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you.”

“What is the biggest obstacle to creativity? Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you're doing and in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities. Creativity is not just about succeeding. It's about experimenting and discovering.”

“To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past...Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions...Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood...Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.”

“I challenge you to make your life the masterpiece you want to paint, the novel you want to read, the day you want to wake to.”

“You painted all those characters into the paintings all over the school, and every one of them is a portrait of you, but in disguise. That’s how you’ve been watching us. You spread yourself out through all those paintings. And since you are the original artist, nobody else can ever destroy the portraits. It was your way of assuring you could always keep an eye on things, even after death.”

“Imagine your life is a big canvas. Picture it in your mind and think about the beginnning of your painting of life.You're fourteen yours old, and you are lucky if you have one seventh painted. Now imagine the rest of the canvas is totaly empty. Every day you live, and every month and every year, means another inch that is painted on that canvas. You're going to be painting this empty canvas with your life and when you get to the end of it, what is that painting going to look like?”

“Make your lives a masterpiece, you only get one canvas.”