I decide to go direct to Key West... I know the place quite well, and it's near the points in Florida that I wish to visit. I have an idea at present of doing some work but do not know how long that will last.

Mr. C. Klackner has for sale four etchings etched by myself, at the expense of two years' time & hard work - 'The Life Line,' 'Peril on the Sea,' 'Eight Bells,' 'Mending Tears,' - all of which are very good and should have been put forward long ago, but C. Klackner is waiting for me to die, is my idea of the matter.

This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.

You can't get along without a knowledge of the principles and rules governing the influence of one color upon another. A mechanic might as well try to get along without tools.

With the duckets that I now have safe, I think I will retire at 66 years of age, praise God, in good health.

I do not care to put out any ideas for pictures. They are too valuable and can be appropriated by any art student, defrauding me out of a possible picture.

It is certainly a most tremendous and unprecedented honor and distinction that I have received from Pittsburgh. Let us hope that it is not too late in my case to be of value to American art in something that I may yet possibly do from this encouragement.

When will you learn that the time to buy a thing is when you find what you want? If you go back the next year and try to get more, they will try to sell you something else.

The slavery at Bufford's was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any.

I don't want a lot of people nosing round my studio and bothering me. I don't want to see them at all. Let the dealers have all that bother.