I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.

If you're overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

Certainties are arrived at only on foot.

Don't ever sell mankind short by saying there's anything he can't do, ever, or anything that he isn't going to do.

True optimization is the revolutionary contribution of modern research to decision processes.

A market that's as open as possible is the precondition for a successful economy, and a successful economy is the precondition to being able to pay for social security.

Sometimes it's harder to play good tennis with a bad tennis player - the same way it's hard to be a good actor with a bad actor. It's just an unpleasant experience.

My entire mission in life is to help women take over the world. Not by force (the route so many men have taken since the beginning of time), but with compassion, perseverance, and love.

Women have to be a lot smarter and brighter and have to work a lot harder to prepare themselves. They have to watch what they do and how they behave. It's not a free world yet.

If I had more recreation time I would be able to step back and reflect on how life has changed. But it has been like a constant... boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.