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.

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

Christians are the carriers of truth that the whole world needs

You can get the answer of your every question in the empty hands of the beggar. But still you are questioning why his hands are empty.

Color me....BRILLIANT.

A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it’s really hard to catch.

When I have a wrong attitude, I look at life humanly. When I have a right attitude, I look at life divinely.

To good and true love fear is forever affixed.

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us, that is taught to us when we are very, very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many.

The legal theory is, that marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband.

In spite of everything that was done to me and my race, in spite of the adversity and the bitter moments, again we rise.