We... joked a little about presidential portraits. He [Bill Clinton] told me that he and Harrison Ford had been joking recently about how chins drop with age, and he didn't want to look that way.

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision.

We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like crawling back because so many techniques are lost, and so we're going to have a [small] reserve of teachers who can teach the vast number of interested students. We have these poor, hungry, starving people who want to learn something and no place to get it. It's a tragedy.

If I am using a sable, it may start off as an eight or seven, but it's a double aught by the time I'm done. I hate brights... they have no use. You might as well buy a filbert and take the scissors and cut off half of what you paid for.

If you find yourself with a weakness, attack it... don't develop a technique that avoids your weaknesses.

There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I need to be fairly straightforward. I'll just try to paint the man, his intelligence, his amiability and his stature, maybe paint him fairly close to humor and try to get it just right.

I'm drawing in my head pretty much.