I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.

You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind... a continuous stream of observations from which to make selections later. Above all things get abroad, see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen.

Mine is the horny hand of toil.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.