When you don't know how to pick up a brush, you don't know anything; at that moment you're an artist. I'll simply say, 'If you know less, you're better off as an artist.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

Pulling yourself up again is the most important part of your life. Getting out of the bottom that you put everything into - yourself!

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.

You always have the memory of the bottom, and fear of the bottom. And when you start going to the bottom you panic.

You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

The religions never wanted an art where you paint only what you see.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

I think we had quite enough capitalism in the last eight years; I think we need some regulation now.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.

My record is, far as I know, unimpeachable.

I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern.

Where the hell is Chad?

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.

It seems the brighter you are, the deeper the hole you get into.