You put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

When you view your world exclusively through the lens of science, your prescription will never be strong enough.

With all the movies I've done, I still get recognized from my episode of 'Law & Order' more than anything else. It never fails.

You don't have conversations with microprocessors. You tell them what to do, then helplessly watch the disaster when they take you literally!

All the time travelling in the world can’t make someone love you.

Whatever trips you make, you must still have nature in your eye.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Now unless you have billions of dollars, it's impossible to reach tens of millions of American people no matter how hard you campaign.

Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.

Government cannot kill the liberty to think. The idea, the thought, lives forever.

If you can believe, worry and anxiety will vanish