Photographs and reality are just night and day. In reality, the information is all there. A photograph is just kind of a hint.

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses.

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.

Realism has to be such high quality, you can't fake it. It's all hanging out there like the laundry.

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

I try to think and design in color.

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.

To find and enjoy profound happiness, learn from nature and emulate her stoic calmness.

Intelligence in a spouse is a timeless quality.

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

Education is not solely about earning a great living. It means living a great life.

Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different.

When you start a collection, you have to push yourself to limits that may make you uncomfortable.

Baby boomers selling your rumors of their history, forcein' youth away from the truth of what's real today

You can't take no breaks.

The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.