When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't

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.

All this while I kept thinking where did I go wrong, all this while he wasn't mine to lose.

Yes, human salvation will come through science, but only through the nature-respecting science!

I'm glad that my films have been consistently faring well rather than one stray Friday!

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.

I have to force myself even to move my eyeballs. It's so easy just to stare.

Such hubris could only come from a man's mouth.

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality.

The prisoner grows to love his chains.

Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.