(Art is) the residue of vision.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.

When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing

The only way that your work will truly find an audience is if it is genuine.

I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.

The Attorney General made another astonishing claim, that there were Pakistani terrorists possibly coming on these boats from Haiti. No one has ever seen a Pakistani coming on a boat from Haiti yet.

The desire to succeed has a lot less compulsion than the fear of failure.

Unfortunately something always has to go by the wayside.

Transcendent values like trust and integrity literally translate into revenue, profits and prosperity.

My way of writing a book is completely disorganized - to hurl myself at the problem, over and over.

It's probably even the case that if you stoked up some Buddhist monks with tons of testosterone, they'd become wildly competitive as to who can do the most acts of random kindness.

The leap is made by dropping vanity over knowledge and by a willingness to become nothing in order to become everything.