Losing as much money as I can get hold of is an instant solution to my economic problems.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.

It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

Every day I see lot of things cluttered in my surroundings. But that neither stresses me nor does it puts me down. Instead, it tells me that things will give you trouble if you see it as trouble.

Nothing hurts more than the friendly letter that one never got around to writing.

I believe that happiness can be found. If I thought otherwise, I should be silent and not make unhappiness the more bitter by discussing it.

It's important that a film is loud and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theater. It should surround you, envelope you, so you can live inside a dream.

The worst thing is the day you realize you want to win more than the players do.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You never learn from success.

The freedom we enjoy is a richly textured gift handcrafted by ordinary folk

Enough work to do, and strength enough to do the work.

We can control our borders, we just choose not too.

I am still happy to be close to the city, [to be] connected to the intellectual source in Ferndorf. In this area, [I feel] connected with nature and unimportant in a postitive way.