"I’ve been a dairy farmer, managed farms, taught Vocational Agriculture, worked in a microbiology lab and worked on an embryo transfer team on a large commercial dairy. I’ve managed businesses and I’ve owned my own. I’ve been a laborer, understand carpentry and rock laying, been involved in electricity and have hung wall coverings and ceramic. I have obtained my advanced degrees in education administration and been both an assistant principal and a principal. I’ve been a salesman and been involved in marketing most of my life; however, I have had one dream, for more than twenty-three years: to become an artist."

"When I disengaged from education administration I attempted to get back into sales, but the fire just wasn’t there. I became frustrated with making money for other people and decided it was time to do what I have wanted."

"What I offer the world, has taken a lifetime (fifty-seven years) of preparation. Finally, I’m doing what I love and I love what I do. What do I want from life? I would say I seek a richness of vision, based in fantasy, perfumed by exoticism, with a charm of feminism and a true delicacy of style. Reality desperately needs the lyrical, the sensuous line, the colors that arouse and excite, the beauty that penetrates and inspires."

"I am transported by the sweet smells of sawdust. I am confronted by an ever-present daring of a challenge—cutthroat daring; the reckless assault on established barriers. I am after not the sleek, but the ornamental. I am all about embellishments created from the heart, fashioned by the hand and shaped by desire. I am into fire on the page, thrown on a canvas, put behind a magnificent frame, on the wall, in the wall. I think craftsmanship adds vitality to the soul and love to life."

"The most famous banker who ever lived was Lorenzo Medici. Lorenzo died the year Columbus discovered a wonderful land—1492. Here’s what this banker had to say:"

“Great nations are not remembered for their great battles or their great banks, but for the beauty they leave behind. In the end, only art endures.”

"Having been so involved in what I thought were great pursuits for so many years, but only deeply tasting the bitterness of empty promises, I have made up my mind to go back to the days, in my own mind, to the times when countries were willing to go to war over the services of an artist."

"It is my intention to bring beauty back. Listen to how fed up and bored people are. It is time to re-introduce imagination. It is not mine to convert, but to inspire. My game is simply this: pure, open, unadulterated, hard-breathing seduction. It’s called—temptation; not the type that lures to evil, but to overcome the ugly with a greater temptation to beauty."

"It is my intention to seduce you. To seduce literally means, “to tow”. Keep in mind, all towing involves pulling, not pushing. Is it not possible for a man to maintain a certain level of performance by stressing duty? Surely. Happens every day. But what we need to realize is this: the very highest artistic, architectural, sociological, psychological, spiritual, and moral human achievements depend, not on a push, but a pull."

"May I be allowed to charm you? Can the work of my hands entice you? What will it take for people to abandon their chastity to stupidity and fall into a hungry desire for adultery with wisdom? Artists, through the ages, have been the catalysts toward great achievements, magnificent accomplishments, and great readiness to face the impossible with courage."

"My life’s loves have been way too small. It’s past time to leave the mud pies of littleness and recklessly throw myself to a cause much greater than myself." Michelangelo wrote, “What flaxes up and burns is my food. What other people die from I need to live. Fire is my fate!”

"Powers that have always lived within my breast have leapt to life. Sometimes it’s hard to control myself in my workshop. Beauty threatens to break out at every moment. Yes, I’ve been seduced, enticed from within to crush the illusions which create littleness and start living for what I’ve longed. And to my last day, I shall gladly accept the charm of arts’ pay. For it pays daily in things like rhapsodic eruptions, creative impulses that dominate and sway my very soul."

Steven William Hager