I consider myself lucky to have had wonderful teachers. They expose you to a lot and basically teach you how to paint. I think of my career as a series of lucky incidents.

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That's a big shift.

When you're using a long brush, you have your arm at full length. Basically, it exaggerates the movement of your body. But I always start far away and end up really close.

A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.

Holding together a kind of tension. When you see a painting that's really good that's what it's doing.

A work of art is a renewable source of energy.

I'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction.

Painters are amongst the priests - worker priests of the cult of man - searching to understand but never know.

I've always worn a hat when I work. I think it also comes from a picture of Rothko I saw with a painter's hat on.

I don't remember any dream. All I remember is waking up and feeling that there had been a change while I was sleeping.

When you're not smoking anymore, you don't have to carry around a pack of cigarettes, a lighter - all this paraphernalia. So you're liberated in a certain sense. It's the same with drinking.

You can't control who your family is. I know about that. You can only pick good friends and maybe that's a better family.

Avoid anger

‎Man is never his emotions and that all feelings are ephemeral- that no one is truly genuinely ecstatic, sad, angry or passionately in love forever, which means emotions are never to be trusted.

The day you were bornHeaven wept at its great loss, Earth joyed at its gain.

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.

Be your own lamps. Be your own shelters. Hang on to the truth as a lamp. Hang on to the truth as a refuge.

These auspicious aspects, which the astrologers subsequently interpreted for me, may have been the causes of my preservation.

The discrimination is not made openly, but a Negro who goes to such places is informed that there are no accommodations, or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he does not come again.

I think Black Eyed Peas are kind of unique in the ways they produce their songs. Their songs are very current.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.