Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

Get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don't enter anymore.

It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You accept the historical Jesus?

When my mother passed away I was 20.

Do unto the other feller the way he'd like to do unto you, and do it fast.

Live the Life you'd be envious of if you saw someone else living it.

All the good things in my career are a direct descendant of what I did and learned at #‎ camp

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

My mother named me after a miracle of nature: Waris means desert flower. The desert flower blooms in a barren environment where few living things can survive.

I never want to listen to the songs in front of people close to me. There's an emotional honesty in that place where it's not earnest but it's vulnerable.