I wanted to paint pictures of people. I thought, "Why bother doing anything else. Everything else is a waste of time. I want to tell stories about people and their feelings and emotions."

You have to be polite with your friends and your family, but in your art, it's important to not be polite.

You always feel very vulnerable when you put your work out there. You feel a kind of nakedness. And you expose something of the inner workings of the way you experience life.

I think it's important to make art that is not that easily absorbable, that is a challenge to the authorities.

I think great art goes beyond the control of the artist. In some ways, art often makes itself and reveals things about that artist that maybe the artist is not fully conscious of.

If you don't have your unconscious working for you, you're really out of luck as an artist.

There was an expression of intensity in dance that was so compelling to me that I wanted a piece of that action.

A good film is always nourishing. It's not about it being hopeful or bleak; it's about how it touches you, how it moves or stirs you.

I'm not trying to be a finger-wagger at society. I sort of start with myself.

I think it's really important as an artist not to be drawn to the haters, because there are so many people who are nice and quiet.

Sometimes audiences love you because they get to boo you.

When I opened the door, Andrew was standing there like a remedy for heart palpitations. Or maybe he made them worse. It was hard to tell.

Play life on hard. Easy might be safer but where is the fun in that?

The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.

I am a rubbish flirt.

I don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father's house? MTo seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.

I got my career started late so, even though I'm getting older, I don't have as much wear and tear on my arm. I feel good. I really do.

It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.

All of us are embarrassed by some of what we are.

She changes everything she touches. And everything she touches changes.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.