I have never been able to understand the artist whose image never changes.

I need to be alone for certain periods of time or I violate my own rhythm.

The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about.

I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.

I am never free of the past. I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.

I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.

I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let's see if I can do it.

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

We get used to a certain kind of colour of form or format, and it's acceptable. And to puncture that is sticking your neck out a bit. And then pretty soon, that's very acceptable.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.

When love intoxicates your heart, it is difficult for your soul to remain sober.

Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

government has no business intervening in any consensual private behavior.

Death cannot alter facts - only feelings.

Friends, in my experience, are like ladies' fashions. They come and go with the seasons, and are rarely of such stout stuff as bears repeated wearing.

Create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level, ideally, of fidelity that that you would make them yourself.

I had a very curly perm in the '80s, thanks to the 'Way You Make Me Feel' Michael Jackson video. I liked the girl in it.

Optimism is a much more enabling mindset than hard-core realism, and it's far superior to pessimism...[because] Hope helps move us in the direction of our goals and ambitions.

As in, I think 'Badlands' is one of the funniest films of all time: "Every day I wish I was carried off to a magical land, but that never happened" is one of the funniest lines in any film.