“A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.”

“One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.”

“The work of art is a scream of freedom.”

“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.”

“Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.”

“More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.”

“There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.”

“When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man's life.”

“Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.”

“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.”

“To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.”

“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.”

“I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.”

“Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!”

“When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.”

“Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.”

“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.”

“The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”

“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”

“I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.”