The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

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

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

I learned you could suffer a terrible tragedy and still be happy again.