Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does

The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.