from Drawing by Barry Cooke
 
Drawing is simple. It requires few tools and is generally, though it doesn’t know it, at the beginning of the development process (which is why we later paint). In this century anyway, every ten years or so Painting is pronounced dead, outdated, a dinosaur, an atavism to be replaced by Conceptualism (in the 1970s), Installation and Photography (in the 1990s) and maybe now by computers. Of course it always returns because it is so simple. Nearly all the great visual discoveries could be shown with a pencil. Probably drawing is as near to instinct as can be found in art.

from Drawing The Line by Michael Craig-Martin
 
I have always loved drawings.  They are the great secret of art: vast in number, mostly unknown, often thought of a secondary, rarely reproduced, and, because of their sensitivity to light, seldom seen. Their usual characteristics of modesty and intimacy have conspired to deny them widespread recognition…….
The most striking thing about many of the drawings of the past and of other cultures is how ‘modern’ they look. I believe that this is because the qualities we have come to value most highly in art in the twentieth century have always been present in art, but usually in the past have characterized only modest and ‘secondary work’; that is, drawings. These characteristics include spontaneity, creative speculation, experimentation, directness, simplicity, abbreviation, expressiveness, immediacy, personal vision, technical diversity, modesty of means, rawness, fragmentation, discontinuity, unfinishedness, and open endedness. These have always been the characteristics of drawing.

from The Basis Of All Painting and Sculpture is Drawing by John Berger
 
For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind's eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations. It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what  you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see.

from Drawing is… by Tom Fitzgerald
 
Drawing is a tingle in the nerve-ends of the imagination
Drawing is a primeval act
Drawing is a way of saying “I was here”
Drawing is the longest distance between two points
Drawing is making connections
Drawing is an electric shock delivered through a pencil
Drawing is a journey with no end in sight
Drawing is a language without words
Drawing is energy recording itself
Drawing is imagery resisting arrest……….