If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective

Common objects become strangely uncommon when removed from their context and ordinary ways of being seen.

If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it.

I think of myself as a beginner. Sometimes that's the whole joy. If you could just do it, there'd be no point in doing it.

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

Every paint-stroke takes you farther and farther away from your initial concept. And you have to be thankful for that.

Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom.

I'm not just interested in the pictorial aspects of the landscape - see a pretty place and try to paint it - but in some way to manage it, manipulate it, or see what I can turn it into.

Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.

Art means something very rare, an extraordinary achievement.

Commonplace objects are constantly changing… The pies, for example, we now see, are not going to be around forever. We are merely used to the idea that things do not change.

If you don't accept and respect your suffering, it isn't going anywhere.

Not the way he looks, but specifically the way he looks at me threatens my inhibitions. It’s all greedy yearning.

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.

They make money the old fashioned way... they earn it.

Three cigarettes in, your body already craves it. It is that addictive.

Love and friendship, two of life's abiding rewards, are endangered species in Hollywood. People crave both, mistaking alliance for friendship, lust for love, and ambition for both.

Remember, the only difference between 'marital' and 'martial' is where you put the 'i'.

one question for me and others like me is whether ... we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and, if so, what we will do to lessen them.

I try to look at the whole thing and say 'yes' to the projects that I cannot stop thinking about. If I read a script and the subject stays with me - then that's when I want to go to work.