The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: do the painter's emotions come across?

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

Half the world wants to be like Thoreau worrying about the noise of traffic on the way up to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.

If you're a painter, you're not alone. There's no way to be alone.

You instinctively like what you can't do.

To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.

The nature of anguish is translated into different forms.

Vitarags [the enlightened one] do not have a desire for giving or receiving charity. They are in the state of ‘shuddh upyog’ [pure awareness of pure soul].

Why not risk your life, if you don't want to live anyway? Why not risk your life if you'll never be happy no matter what you do?

Complete control can be the death of a work.

Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight.

Marriages struggle because we've set our marriages up to fail by thinking that this person is going to complete me when they were never created to do that.

If I had spent a quarter of the time that I spent manipulating my sexuality in front of a piano instead, I would be the most gifted piano player of my lifetime.

It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood.

I'm a believer of destiny and I believe I'm destiny's child. I've seen the highs and I've seen the lows and I believe things happen for a reason and always for the best.

...boredom is all about perception. It's a self-diagnosis, plain and simple. If you don't realize you're bored, you're not.

Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.