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

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.

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.

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.

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.

if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.

My golf is woeful, but I will never surrender

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

Don't get older; get better: Live realistically. Give generously. Adapt willingly. Trust fearlessly. Rejoice daily.

Every character and person in life needs a voice and every once in a while I get to inhabit the voice of the misunderstood.

All through the years since World War II, the Japanese people have, I am convinced, made strenuous efforts to preserve and promote world peace, contributing to the progress and prosperity of mankind.

Write today's worries in sand. Chisel yesterday's victories in stone.

We are basically in the nicotine business. . . . Effective control of nicotine in our products should equate to a significant product performance and cost advantage.

I don't think I'm prepared to give away my technique to Great Britain. Are you crazy? All I can say is there was a ninja and a fire truck involved, and a great deal of coersion.

Nothing's going to come to you by sitting around and waiting for it.