Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is.

There is hope and a kind of beauty in there somewhere, if you look for it.

A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative . . . or they are crazy.

You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.

The Dutch customs once thought my pictures were photos. Where on earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects? In Hell, perhaps?

I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work.

The creature we finally ended up building is biomechanical to the extent that he has physically grown into, or maybe even out of, his seat, - he's integrated totally into the function he performs.

You know I was curious - I was interested in all kinds of mystery or deeper meanings in the paintings because I myself have not analyzed why they have turned out like this or like that.

You know, it was just another presentation of my work, and a funny one, because the cards are quite different from the normal Tarot deck, no?

To wear something like that your whole life is the largest compliment someone can pay to you as an artist.

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.

Young people should travel, and they don't. You can't know if you don't go.

Spread good energy. Pay it forward!

With most of the events in the books [ Bridget Jones Diaries ] I draw a little bit from my own life and some from what I see happening around me.

Government is so big today that more than half the population gets a major part of its income from the state.

If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you don't have a regime.

As you grow in self-esteem, your face, manner, way of talking and moving will tend naturally to project the pleasure you take in being alive.

Whatever you feel or think your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke.

The Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of unbaptized infants and the Calvinistic doctrine of reprobation . . . surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan creed.