I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

Life is very short... but I would like to live four times and if I could, I would set out to do no other things than I am seeking now to do.

Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished.

Don't try to make comparisons between your own pictures. Forget what you have done and think only of making the best of what you are doing.

Combine a certain amount of indifference with your ambition. Be carefully careless. If you don't succeed today, there is always tomorrow.

Do not imagine that I would disregard that thing that lies beneath the mask... but be sure that when the outside is rightly seen, the thing that lies under the surface will be found upon your canvas.

I am not sure that it is a bad thing to go to a school, as I did, where the boys threw things at me, and asked if there was nothing else I could do [but draw].

It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.

Design is everything.

You must try to match your colors as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on natures own hues and tints.

Association with my pupils has kept me young in my work. Criticism of their work has kept my own point of view clear.

Being sceptical about technology is like deciding whether or not you should breath.

You have to be willing to recognize failure.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

To learn a thing in life and through doing is much more developing, cultivating, and strengthening than to learn it merely through the verbal communication of ideas.

I do not believe this darkness will endure.

Bottom line, wasn’t life itself a special occasion?

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

There's a lot of reflection that goes on whenever I write a song - it's been a wild whirlwind last couple of years and there's a lot to talk about, and hopefully that's evident in the music.

Talk and action are two different things.

In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.