If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

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.

Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.

The great lie that science has given us is that reality is material.

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.

Egotist: 1. A person who is his own best friend. 2. An I specialist. 3. A man whose opinions all change, except the one he has of himself.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

...in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations.

Long as I live large, life will be luxury, Ladies in Lamborghinis...love is like luck to me.

The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.