All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.

If you're overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.

You can radically alter the worth of your life when you develop inner voices that serve and support your true purpose.

Maybe I don't need to save her forever. Maybe I can just save her right now, in this moment, and if I can do that, maybe it will save me and maybe that can be enough.

On less lucid evenings, every library is a haunted cemetery.

The laborer is worthy of his hire.

I want to be a simple bride when I get married. I want a beach wedding where I am running around on the sand in a white dress.

The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

The rules may seem obvious but when you think about them they're not. For somebody who has my job they're not as obvious as one would think.