I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives

Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.

There is a cunning which we in England call "the turning of the cat" in the pan; which is, when that which a man says to another, he says it as if another had said it to him.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.