Leaving some areas less finished in a painting, or more out of focus than others, allows the imagination to finish them and gives more importance to the detailed parts.

Most beginners are too anxious for results. Real progress takes place over a long period of time.

I always work directly from life, partly because I really enjoy having an interaction with the person in front of me but also because I love having a direct response to shape and color.

Nothing is more beautiful than a line that brings out a form.

You have to evolve as an artist, and this is really a lifelong process.

A painting has its own existence and reality, and I make changes freely to meet the painting's needs. This sometimes takes me in another direction.

Cats sleep in a state of total abandon, and I find that state very interesting in people as well.

Sometimes working on one painting will help solve a problem in another painting.

Everything in painting is about relationship, so I judge each area by its relationship to the surrounding areas.

I usually start by doing one or more color studies of the subject on a piece of canvas taped to cardboard.

Artists make things so much easier for themselves when they learn to trust their eyes.

There is a good guilt and a bad guilt... the good one Leeds us to ask for forgiveness the bad Leeds us to hide from God.

The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.

The want of a thing is perplexing enough but the possession of it is intolerable.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

It's a significant question: should black people only adopt black children, and white people white children?

I have an excuse, actually, why I've been drinking so much. I haven't said this out loud yet - this is exciting - I'm drinking for two. Thank you, wow. I mean, just for now. Somebody's being evicted.

Anything that is created must sooner or later die. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.

To know all, it is necessary to know very little; but to know that very little, one must first know pretty much.

You might be a redneck if you hammer bottle caps into the frame of your front door to make it look nice.

Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is remembrance, you cannot forget pain.