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

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.

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 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.

He was so good and honest. Why couldn't I love him instead?

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

Experience yourself in silence.

But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.

Finally, as I've said, this is - why are you talking about Jewish women's wigs and people wearing turbans? That has nothing whatsoever to do with niqab.

Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus.

It seems clear to me also that climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to our future generation.

Don't cheer me, just hear me Out 'cause I got the clout-shout (Ho!) Before I turn the party out

Love your country, not for her power or wealth, but for her selflessness and her idealism.

Quite frequently, he who goes too fast gets there too late - or not at all.