I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

The only secret I can claim to have is concentration, and that's something that can't be taught.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't