I love painting still lifes because there's a feeling of musical, flowing experience. The drawing doesn't matter as much - what you're really after is a feeling of clarity and beauty.

The over-reliance on photography holds so many artists back.

There are many ways to draw beautifully. It's important to let the drawing be an investigation and sometimes, in order to investigate, you need to go off the path.

You can't go back. I know that. But you can look back.

Finishing is torture... There's always some newly seen flaw. But the little glimpses of beauty between the anxiety make it worth it.

I spend so much time in my studio, which can be very dark, so it can begin to feel as if I'm a mole underground.

It takes a lot of courage to be happy.

Maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things.

In Southern California along the coast, if the only thing you can do with the land is agriculture, it would be substantially less (in value) than property that has almost any other allowable use.

The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object--the joy of living--is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up.

I should have proposed that night in your room." "I should have let you.

There is always a limit to self-indulgence, but none to self-restraint.

Virtue is uniform, conformable to reason, and of unvarying consistency; nothing can be added to it that can make it more than virtue; nothing can be taken from it, and the name of virtue be left.

Scale is extremely important. Scale is not dimensions. Dimensions are physical and scales are mental.

I don't want to be modelling G-strings. It's not that good for my image – I'm a footballer not a tart

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.