It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

Photographs and reality are just night and day. In reality, the information is all there. A photograph is just kind of a hint.

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses.

Realism has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry.

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

I try to think and design in color.

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

They feared you, and love can’t exist when there’s that much fear.

It was that Moment when your fingers touched my skin for the first time I realised, how the fire can heal scars.

You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that's all.

The ability to suffer is a small matter - weak women and even slaves can acheive virtuosity in that.

The more you devote yourself to study of the sacred utterances, the richer will be your understanding of them, just as the more the soil is tilled, the richer the harvest.

If we cannot be decent, let us endeavor to be graceful. If we can't be moral, at least we can avoid being vulgar.

Unity does not mean sameness. It means oneness of purpose.

Winged time glides on insensibly, and deceive us; and there is nothing more fleeting than years.

Every generation thinks the cultural rot during their time is worse than it's ever been. That's not true.