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 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.

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.

Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.

We create things to watch them grow, Ruin, she said. To take pleasure in seeing that which we love become more than it was before.

God doesn't respond to your tears and emotions, He responds to your faith!

First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.

It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.

Now climb, young grasshopper, so your Kung Fu won't be weak.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

God does not give us ready money. He issues promissory notes, and then pays them at the throne. Each one of us has a check-book.