The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.

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.

I reside in an abode where your thoughts imagine me... You reside in my heart where the auricles camouflage my longing...

Don't trust the heart, it wants your blood.

Everything I am longing for - peace of mind, contentment, grace, the inner awareness of my abundance - will surely be mine... when I am prepared to receive ALL with an open and Thankful heart.

It can provide horrendous weapons to idiots.

I like to design my clothes; I design my jewelry, yeah. It's fun.

There is nothing wrong with me. These are really sick people, sick that you can see.

If the view is very beautiful, do not sit and watch; go to the view, be in the view!

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

When I was a kid, I loved reading Sherlock Holmes. Now, you don't think of him as a superhero, but he was so damn much smarter than anybody else.