I hope that we can bridge the worlds of appearances and of insights, and thus rescue art from triviality, from 'sensation' alone.

The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.

Very early in life, I fell in love with the landscape of the human face, where all the emotional states of life are to be found.

I continue to make paintings of people and their moments in our time because I am of that time. Out of that I hope to make pictures that are timeless.

Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.

I love an art which allows me to document my place in this mix... This is my past and my future. It has its own logic and finally, its own sense of fulfillment.

I do not believe that the way paint is applied should be more important than what is portrayed.

We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.

My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and to be ruthlessly selective.

I love the fact that there are more and more young people out there who still want to make a flat two-dimensional surface come alive with three dimensional magic.

Artists must literally go into a zone of intense seeing so the subjective and objective almost fuse together.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

...remember that what has once been done may be done again.

I love Valentine's Day! I love it, I love it, I love it. I like having doors opened for me. My favorite romantic comedy is 'When Harry Met Sally.'

Give me Thy light, and fix my eyes on Thee!

With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn't end there.

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

The point of the Book of Job is not suffering: where is God When It hurts? The prologue (chapters 1-2) dealt with that issue. The point of the Book of Job is faith: Where is Job when it hurts?

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

I know how I live my life. I have a little magnet brain that attracts the kind of things that obsess me.