Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.

As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.

An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.

The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

My life didn't please me, so I created my life.

Self-governing cultures both inspire alignment and eject elements that don't fit in.

There comes a time in the development of every ego when it must love its neighbors or become a twisted and stunted personality.

Who hit you?""Clara.""Clara!""She whaled me one in return for upsetting you. Well, at least, that was the main reason.

Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.

Maybe I just never learned my harmony part, because what everybody says sounds odd to them sounds perfectly natural to me.

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

My whole life has been the skate life. I don't really remember doing anything besides skateboarding.

All you need in any industry is someone to back you, and Jim Cameron backed me up.

The ability to create and to control the tension of battle is perhaps the principal attainment of the great player.