I’m an odd portrait painter in that I’m not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

Painting to me is constant searching. I can see what I want, but I can’t get there, and yet you have to be open enough that if it goes another way, then let it go that way.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It’s not that relaxing. But that’s the discipline.

All my problems and anxieties certainly come out of my work, and that's the way it should be. Other than that, relationships with people I find very, very simple.

The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on - I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.

I began drawing when I was nearly 3, and after finishing the sixth grade, I left school to paint and was tutored at home. My father didn't think a formal education was necessary for a painter.

I had been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, and one of the requirements was that you give a portrait, a self-portrait of yourself.

I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.

I'm a very boring person, and all I do is want to paint and to record what I feel moves me or what interests me, and that can be in the form of a pig or in the form of President Kennedy.

I'm a very strange painter. I don't wake up one day and say, 'God, isn't this a fantastic day, I'd better get out and paint!' I think my father's more that way, because he's very fast.