Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.

Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.

There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.

In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn't going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.