The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

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.

A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.

We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown.

Oh, God, the lovebirds,” Magnus said, pulling the pillow off his face. “I hate happy couples.

It's, like, a rule. You can't have Christmas without snow.

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

I will have no man work for me who has not the capacity to become a partner.

Gravity is neither a force nor a consequence of any space-time curvature. It is simply an orderly spatial illusion to non-spatial observer/s.

Beyond any technique, relationships are what heal.

I believe in the battle-whether it's the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.

I try to look at things in a positive way. If someone says something negative to me, I'll just turn it around into a positive.