My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint - and repaint.

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.

...a dream isn't a wish - it's an altered state of consciousness ...

Timing is everything, as you know.

There are some people who have been reading me for years, and they keep saying kind things about the writing. That's what you're writing for, to get people to respond to it.

I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me

I don't care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves whatever anyone says about him.

Don't be silly. I'll write you twice a week.

Happiness does not depend on what happens outside of you, but what happens inside of you.

If it's time for you to go, leave willingly - as you would to accomplish anything that can be done with grace and honor.

You can't fake some of this chemistry, even when you get a guy and a girl and they've got to be together.

The person that loves the least, controls the relationship