Quotes
I’ve been reading Charles Dunn’s Conversations in Paint. Its full of great quotes for painters, but so many of them apply to improv as well that I had to post a few here. In fact, I like the enough to have retyped them after losing the first set to an accidental reboot! 
You’re afraid because you’re thinking about the end, not about what you’re doing. –Helen Van Wyk
Nothing is as poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not its subject. –Santayana
A golfer rarely needs to hit a spectacular shot until the one that preceded it was pretty bad. –Harvey Penick
The amateur is afraid of boldness; the professional is afraid of timidity. –Ed Whitney
Exactly right is all wrong! –Ed Whitney
If you don’t know how to say it, say it loud. –Will Strunk, Jr.
Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head. –Cezanne
The painting is usually finished before you are. –Rex Brandt
Anything is intensified by its opposite. –Ed Whitney
A painting is good, not because it looks like something, but because it feels like something. –Phil Dike
Some musicians are not great technicians, but they give you a rich point of view. –Nathan Milstein
Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasure of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty. –Kenneth Clark
If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much. –Artie Shaw
It’s not what you paint. It’s how you paint it. You don’t have to paint elaborate things. Paint simple things as beautifully as you can. –Helen Van Wyk
The audience is astonishingly friendly and tolerant of even the slightest dab, but is limited in its willingness to look either deeply or at length. –Rex Brandt
The wonderful becomes familiar and the familiar wonderful. –Edward R. Tufte
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. –Anatule France
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by all eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by increasing the number of important operations we can perform without thinking. –Alfred North Whitehead
Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim. –Jacques Barzun