The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.

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.

Who needs coffee when you have passion?

Your words... I hold them deeplike ancient skinshold wrinkles.

Once you make a journey to a near impossible destination, you get to realize how everything and anything is possible

I have been tied up with music for about as long as I can remember. By the time I was four I was picking out little tunes my mother played on the reed organ in the living-room.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

You get bummed out, and then you go, "Oh! Now I get to go buy a present for myself." That kind of helps.

I am never frightened when I tell the truth.

If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

Relationships are such that if one person changes, the relationship changes.

I was wrong to exaggerate in statements related to my experiences in the White House and the Royal Family. I am truly sorry for misleading people and misstating the facts.