I love the healthy exchange of information.

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.

I did not know what the future would bring, but I knew that life is not merely about knowledge. It is about the courage and trust that we place in our stories.

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

I believe that a smile is the attribute of a positive attitude, both for yourself and the perception of others.

Accidents are just incidents in God's good plan for you.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

A Hospital isn't any place to end up being sick.

Segregation in the South is honest, open and aboveboard. Of the two systems, or styles of segregation, the Northern and the Southern, there is no doubt whatever in my mind which is the better.

I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.