Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can't get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.

I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.

It's raining... because I am angry...*You know my story!

We don't consider the Wizard of Oz or Father Christmas to be too old. They're still magical characters, and the fact they've been around the block only adds to their magic.

Fondnesse it were for any being free, To covet fetters, though they golden bee.

Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.

Man is and remains an animal.Here a beast of prey, there a housepet, but always an animal.

A hug's a happy thing while a shrug's so often destructive.

One may be my very good friend, and yet not of my opinion.

It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

I try not to think of actors as I'm writing because I think you do them a disservice by writing for things they've already done.

There is nothing stronger than human prejudice. A crazy sentimentalism, like that of Peter the Hermit, hurled half of Europe upon Asia, and changed the destinies of kingdoms.