The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter

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.

We don't get to choose the things that happen to us in life. What we can choose is how to react to them, how we deal with them, and how we move on.

You can never be fit enough for this game.

Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.

You just can't keep pouring money down an endless hole and never recoup any of it. It's got to be a business.

As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary [Hillary] Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we're not.

One thing we know for sure is that we know very little about what will happen next.

Civil disobedience is a lever which can move the world by using peace as a fulcrum.

I will attack no matter what and win the war!

Any human love a man gets he can make fill his life. It's like the grain of mustard-seed.

Since the nature of people is bad, to become corrected they must be taught by teachers and to be orderly they must acquire ritual and moral principles.