If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

One who doesn't recognise an opportunity is bigger loser than one who tries his hand at an opportunity.

If you find that you are short of funds in the field, remember that any paper can be mind augmented to perform in the place of real money.

You go into extinction by being obsessed about becoming something else and then travelling in the wrong car while your real self keeps waiting at the bus stop for your unfulfilled return!

You have exactly 10 seconds to change that look of disgusting pity, into one of enormous respect!

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

I grew up in Derry, of course, and it was - Derry was the worst example of Northern Ireland's discrimination.

I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

I understand the climate we live in and why people are curious. But it's just tough and almost emotionally violent - for anyone, I think - to see your personal life summarized in a sentence.