"I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form & space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded,
you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.
One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling.
One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling
of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole."