The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye.

The key is loveIt is the gatewayTo hopeTo joyTo enhanced livingLove is the answer

You can actually herd cats. They can't be forced, of course. But if they sense something they want, if there enticed by something good, they'll follow, even in herds.

The Irish way of telling a story is a complex and elaborate one, complete with wild exaggerations, a certain delight in improbable fantasy, and a heightened sense of drama.

Have you not seen that in our days Of any whose story, song or art Delights us, our sincerest praise Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart?

Think higher, feel deeper.

It's very dangerous, making your happiness based on success and fashion. I know the media cares about all that, but I try to ignore that world anyway.

I know other actors who are relieved when their shows get cancelled, and I've never felt that way about 'Community.'

I am a Christian and I don't want there to be any confusion about what I believe or who I am.

Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

Just remember that you don't have to be what they want you to be.