The principal person in a picture is light.

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

Every new painting is like throwing myself into the water without knowing how to swim.

You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real.

I paint what I see and not what others like to see.

There is no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other.

There is only one true thing: Instantly paint what you see.

Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?

Conciseness in art is essential and a refinement. The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores. Always work towards conciseness.

Insults are pouring down on me as thick as hail.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

It is about doing the most good with the only two hands I can control.

Seek knowledge from the Cradle to the Grave

The science that studies the supreme good for man is politics.

When you're a kid, 'Star Trek' is a slower burn. It's funny, it's entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it - which is its universal appeal, I think.

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.

You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don't want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something.

It is the duty of a great person so to demean himself, as that whatever endowments he may have, he may appear to value himself upon no qualities but such as any man may arrive at.

People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.

Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.