The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.

Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can't get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations.

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

Tavin cupped his hands to his mouth. “Here, dragon-dragon-dragon!” he yelled.Lily stared in amazement. Well, that was bold, she thought, and stupid.

God is the light bulb, to where faith is the light switch.

It is not good for the spirits to dwell on that which cannot be altered.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

Don't be concerned that you have no position; be concerned how you may fit yourself to occupy one. .

Three reasons not to have a [spending] plan: 1. You're rich enough to buy anything you want and still have plenty of money left over. 2. I forget the other two.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

Entrenched scriptural literalism is, in my opinion, completely out of touch with reality.

Do what you feel is right, baby.