If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

If there was a volcano under their feet, a Vesuvius that could erupt and bury this modern-day Pompeii at any moment, the best thing to do was dance on it.

Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.

Cultivate an ever-continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

I've also been known to cry during MasterCard commercials.

Any school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

We were never the family that ordered pizza, and my mom never came home with a bucket of fried chicken. My mom always made home-cooked meals. We always sat down at the dinner table as a family.

I've never really separated out the spiritual and the secular.

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

The Queen Elizabeth II provides vast amounts of entertainment for an age that has forgotten how to amuse itself unaided.

Genius unexerted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

Only through practice and more practice, until you can do something without conscious effort.

My family had a habit of collecting creatures that didn't always want to be pets. The first animal I can remember was a Lab named Zoe.