As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

Pulling yourself up again is the most important part of your life. Getting out of the bottom that you put everything into - yourself!

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.

You always have the memory of the bottom, and fear of the bottom. And when you start going to the bottom you panic.

You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

The religions never wanted an art where you paint only what you see.

I painted myself out of my painting.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

I don’t know. She was a sweet girl. As sweet as they come. I don’t know why I didn’t love her. It’s something you can’t really control.

Greed, however it manifests itself, is always ugly.

You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments then the wind blows your footprints away.

I don't need plastic in my body to validate me as a woman.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

In Los Angeles, everything is 100 percent organic, except the people.

Art is a jealous mistress.

The coaches always tell me to stay aggressive.

There is no such way to attain to greater measures of grace, as for a man to live up to that little grace he has.