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.

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.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

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.

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.

I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out.

I am not gamesome: I do lack some partof that quick spirit that is in Antony.

True joy comes from operating with Inner-directedness and recognizing who you are.

Life is simple. Life is complicated.

Earth is a heaven but man often creates many hells within this heaven and a fascist country is one of the hottest and the most suffocating hell amongst all those hells!

Now my body is really womanly - a little too much so. It's someting I can fall back on. When I don't know what else to do, I stick my chest out.

No man does right by a woman at a party.

Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.

Every day is conquerable by its hours, and every hour by its minutes.

I use the music almost as a compass in some kind of quasi-romantic way. I try and go to places that I'm intrigued by, and I take this music with me, using my name at the front.