A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.

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.

Children are the greatest blessing from God.

All the kindness which a man puts out into the world works on the heart and thoughts of mankind.

The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.

The most content people are those who expect nothing, who have ceased to dream.

Pay-TV companies that built their businesses on the backs of local and network broadcast signals should pay a fair price for access to that high-value programming.

I think certainly everybody is aware of the potential for just the very inflamed political mood in America .

Not every thought is a flower; some are thorns. But while a flower may make you fall asleep and too see dreams, a thorn will wake you up and make you to think!

Someone asked me once what my philosophy of life was, and I said some crazy thing. I should have said, how the hell do I know?

Our eyes meet. I hear a train horn, so faint it could be wind whistling through an alleyway. But I know it when I hear it. It sounds like the Dauntless, calling me to to them.