The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement

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.

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

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.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do.Drop dead.Aw, you say the most romantic things.

Very high altitude observatories are a known worker health hazard.

To be knighted, that would be amazing. I remember Alex Ferguson from Man Utd got it and Steve Redgrave - to be in the same category as them is amazing.

I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.

Lord I do fear / Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.

We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, 'Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?'

I'm glad the President finally found an economic development program. I'm just sad that it's only in Baghdad.

I wasn't strong when I was young. The puck was maybe too heavy. I guess I tried to move the puck from side to side to keep from getting hit.

Success abides longer among men when it is planted by the hand of God.