I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.

I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it... I always want to see the third dimension of something... I want to come alive with the object.

Believe in yourself and believe in love. Love something.

Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.

I don't think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.

When you lose your simplicity, you lose your drama.

I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work

What you have to do is break all the rules.

When you lived on the wrong side of the law, information, however vague or apparently meaningless, was everything. It gave you leverage. And leverage was power.

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

Before complaining about your burden of life, you must first try to see what other people's burden of life is!

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

'Hamilton' is, of course, closely tied to the Obamas because Lin first performed the opening number at a White House poetry jam.

Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?

I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.

There is nothing else for you to do but to truly love and nourish the emotionally and spiritually starved parts of you that are crying out for your attention. Are you loving all of yourself?

My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.

The old shepherd was right: The only solution was to forget a part of uncertainty and create a new history for oneself.