For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous 'jeu d'espirit,' and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done.
Robert Motherwell

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
Edgar Degas

I have learned that what I have not drawn,
I have never really seen.
Frederick Franck

Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know he holds a great treasure.
Michelangelo

Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worth while, and it will do you a world of good.
Cennino Cennini

Sketching can be a vital part of your life. It is a motivation for traveling, a means of documenting ideas of every sort, a tool for developing paintings and illustrations, and a very personal way to share with others.
Thomas Kinkade

Pictures that have had months of labor expended on them may be more incomplete than a sketch.
Robert Henri

Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly discover the world.
Frederick Franck

I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as a drawing.
Vincent Van Gogh

Draw, Antonio, draw - draw and don't waste time!
Michelangelo

I say and insist that drawing in company is much better than alone.
Leonardo Da Vinci

Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.
Arshile Gorky

We should talk less and draw more.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

From around the age of six, I have had a passion for drawing the shapes of objects.

From about the age of fifty I produced a number of designs, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.

At seventy-three, I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish and of the vital nature of grasses and trees.

So, by the time I am 80, I will have made much progress, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.

By one hundred, I will decidedly have attained a higher state, indefinable, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line shall surely possess a life of its own.

May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.
Hokusai (who lived to be 90)

Not all of the world's greatest art
is hanging on museum walls;
much of it is tucked away
in sketchbooks around the world.