That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

No matter how bad the situation, do not lose heart.

Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you.

You got beat up. Bones and bruises heal. Those girls didn't win because they didn't do what they wanted. They wanted to break you. I was already broken."You're not broken at all.

And for Peter... well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there's a limit to what you can get away with.

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

Betty White is probably a very nice woman.

Policies seemed almost deliberately designed to suppress new enterprise and job creation. How many Americans will start a business if the interest rates are 150 percent?

I have never suggested any principled difference between the natural and social sciences.

I think the Republicans are subverted by the fact that so many of their leaders send their kids to private schools, they don't really have the stomach for the fight.

It would take centuries and he must grow and grow and grow, but he was in no hurry--he grokked that Eternity and the ever-beautifully-changing Now were identical.