The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.

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.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

Fear is the brother of hate.

This is not suitable for me”- to say this is indeed madness, it is nothing but egoism. To say ‘will not suit’ is an offense.

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

I hardly can sleep. I feel that my target now is really to save Mother Earth for humanity. And it's doable.

Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.

God aims to look valuable in the world, and that happens when we treasure him above all else.

No I don't really write thinking about specific actors because it can get in the way a little bit.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.