How gracious are the gods in bestowing high positions; and how reluctant are they to insure them when given.

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.

Be grateful. By slaying you now, I spare you an eternity of torment.

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 single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes.

Now that I know what I want, I don't have to hold on to it quite so much.

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.

My family came to this country to take advantage of opportunity, not to take advantage of America.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

From lightest words sometimes the direst quarrel springs.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

Be sensitive to subtle differences between 'intuition' and 'into wishing'.

I don't remember my life before I had children.

I don't even do anything in real life. I just sit in my studio and write, I call my friends, I watch television. I don't do anything.

Like Nietzsche, I believe that without music, life would be a mistake. Nothing but silence says it better.

I have arrived, and the spotlight is on me, honey!

I'm having an amazing time teaching through the lives of people much like Jesus did.