Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

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.

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.

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

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.

Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.

We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment

Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.

First of all, on a cinematic [level], the film answer to that is that Roger Corman was creatively responsible for a lot of cinema history.

I don't really believe you are married unless you have children. And people who only have one kid don't really have kids.

If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.

Credibility is what it is ALL about.

There are too many heavy songs out nowadays. music has been getting too heavy, almost to the state of unbearable.

I worked in an art gallery for a few years, doing administrative assistance stuff, and it exposed me to what the whole world of art dealers and the art market was about.

On why he no longer went to Ruggeri's, a St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."