“Judging by your face you don’t think much of the lesson.” “No. It’s rotten, isn’t it?” “Is it? Have we not to master the techniques before practising them?” “But technique and practice are the same thing! We can draw nothing well unless it interests us, and we only learn to draw it well by first drawing it badly, not by drawing what bores us stiff. Learning to draw from dead bulbs and boxes is like learning to make love with corpses.” One student grinned and muttered that that depended on the corpses. The other said sternly, “Are you a Communist?”

— Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canons) by Alasdair Gray (Page 226)