A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.

It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

Joy is joy.

There was not an inch of solid ground anywhere in the world for me to call my own. I didn't belong anywhere. Had I disappeared, no one would have noticed.

Give the historians something to write about.

He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir.

The truth of the matter is we don't understand our women; we blame on them and it's all our fault.

Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't.

I have bad feet and I have weak ankles.

I didn't know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child.

Focus alone is not enough; putting in the time to commit is also crucial to achieve success.

The best thing about skiing backwards is you can see where you've been.