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.

Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.

If you really want to seriously think about life, and therefore take painting very seriously... and take seriously the joys that it can bring to one, then you want to go to museums. You want to study the great of the past.

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color.

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.

A language not based on universal symbols or sensations is gibberish, a pitfall of modern art, no longer modern.

I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally putting in music or literally putting in a musical instrument, I use only a hint of the instrument, but the brocaded pattern is like a line of Bach because of its order and the leaves going up are like passages from Vivaldi, and the emphasis on drapery is where the sound comes.