Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it to kill it to rid it of its soul to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

I want to start my own airplane business. I'm going to buy two Dakotas paint them up in war colours and do er nostalgia trips to Arnhem - you know where the old paratroopers used to go - and charge them about 20 quid a time.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

For far too long we've allowed the other side to paint us as racist as sexist inhumane war mongers - well today as a conservative black Republican and former solider I'm here to set that record straight.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

If there were only one truth you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

The more you travel the better you get at it. It sounds silly but with experience you learn how to pack the right way. I remember one of my first trips abroad travelling around Europe by rail fresh out of high school. I brought all these books with me and a paint set. I really had too much stuff so I've learnt to be more economical.

When I travel I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art I think that's all right.

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance.

My painting teacher in high school used to say 'I can't paint like I want to but through practice I'll get better.' But I don't think that's true. I think sometimes you just can't paint.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe you see. To be a painter was terrible.

The only reason I would stay away from a period piece is because sometimes the women are painted in a very stereotypical weakling wallflower way - that's something I don't want to do. I want to show strength in the women I play and a journey of some sort.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

I get strength from my art - all the paintings I own are powerful.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Nature engenders the science of painting.

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish and one which because of its very catholicity grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.