Garden work consists much more in uprooting weeds than in planting seed. This applies also to teaching.

I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it.

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.

If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you.

Real style is not having a program - it's how one behaves in a crisis.

Ideally, one should have more material than one can possibly cope with.

In addition to the artistic influences, I am influenced by my current private life, my feelings about it and my energy level and state of health.

It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.

Falsehood always punishes itself.

The unity in any painter's work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way... style.

I go out each morning and draw. I can't really start a painting in the morning until I've done a drawing.

When the flow of a river is blocked, it overflows or breaks the barriers. Similarly, our emotions can get out of control if their expression is blocked.

The vile are trampled beneath the feet of other pigs.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Whither should we aim if not towards God?

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

TV is just a huge tablet. It’s just a platform to consume long-form video.

It pains me to speak of God in the third person.

The album for Fiddler really took off. I think it was a combination of John Williams and the score. It was a very classy big album.

Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law. A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.