My studio work is a central part of my life and I'd be at loose ends without it. When I'm not in my studio, I don't stop thinking about painting.

I am very invested in the physical activity and the decision-making that is involved with making paintings - nothing else is quite like it.

I'm interested in how paintings can change or transform - sometimes through close examination or viewed from afar; or how they hold the space of a wall or interact in a room with each other.

Only at the end of the last stroke of paint, you can begin to wonder what needs to be done next.

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.

It isn't important to come out on top. What matters is to come out alive.

When I was first starting out as a kid, I tried to pad my résumé with everything I had ever done-ice-skate, carry a tune.

All I had done for five years was work 18 hours a day all over the world. I needed to step back and distance myself from it.

I'm not running for office. I don't have to be politically correct. I don't have to be a nice person. Like I watch some of these weak-kneed politicians, it's disgusting. I don't have to be that way.

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

The West to me is where the landscape is.

Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself.

Kings stand more in need of the company of the intelligent than the intelligent do of the society of kings.

Sometimes I wonder if all my friends are insane.