Realism has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry.

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.

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.

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

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.

Inside each one of us is a rebel just waiting to be freed. That rebel is the real “You.

By the way, the Harry Potter series is literature, in spite of what some people might say. The way J.K. Rowling worked that world out is quite something.

A person or a ruler who executes his plans (of public welfare) after due consideration, the prosperity stands with him for a longer period.

No one is in a more strategic position than you are to influence the people you are with.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

I understand the lifelong scars born by women who are victims of assault and abuse.

We sometimes freeze the specimen with liquid nitrogen, which is extremely cold, you know. This is another technique we use now - but the specimens are not alive.

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

Are you in a library or what?! (on the crowd being quiet)

As a rule, the more mistakes there are in a game, the more memorable it remains, because you have suffered and worried over each mistake at the board.