Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

All art is self-portraiture.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

May you live a life as holy and perfect as you pretend it to be in Facebook

Pride is seldom delicate: it will please itself with very mean advantages.

A lot of my work comes through accidents or circumstances that just happen to present themselves. I have to realize that something is presenting itself. Otherwise it slips right by.

Anything can be achieved in small, deliberate steps. But there are times you need the courage to take a great leap; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

If you want to live a top shelf life then you need to stand on the books you have read. Never stop learning, never stop growing.

To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.

Flu vaccine is far and away the most underutilized.

Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

I hope to work, support my children and die quietly without pain.

The usual complaint is, 'I have no other way of earning a living.' The harsh reply can be, 'Do you have to live?'