I smoke pot when I work. I take a couple of tokes before I start. It just loosens you up.

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.

A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Children are happy because they have the power of finding happiness in the simplest things.

There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.

There are two easy ways to die in the desert - thirst and drowning.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve.

I would prefer to remain in prison for another 20 years than bargain my beliefs for freedom.

He turn'd his charger as he spake, Upon the river shore, He gave his bridle reins a shake, Said, "Adieu for evermore, my love, And adieu for evermore."