I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

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.

Have you met the French? My...GOD they know how to party!

You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy, but till you feed us right and wrong can wait. Or is it only those who have the money who can enter the land of milk and honey?

It has been my observation that whatever a person hungers for, Satan will appear to offer in exchange for a spiritual compromise.

We have too many sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

I think we must attack -- wherever we meet it -- the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.

When he got loaded, the human cannonball knew there were not many men of his caliber.

I was born in New Zealand, so I have a lot of family there.

Most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.

The world doesn’t need another opinion, they need another person taking action. So I take action because I see the call and respond.