“In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.”

Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

I do not seek. I find.

You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.

My hand tells me what I’m thinking.

I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

When I haven’t any blue I use red.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it’s bidding.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

An artist could have a really big relationship, and then they break up, and any song after that, people are automatically going to assume that that song is about that person.

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.

And this is what was fascinating to me about ‘The Help’; they were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, that’s what it was.

Just because I’m an artist doesn’t mean I should be treated differently.

I’m gonna write from personal experience, from emotion, from whatever the hell I’m feeling that day.

Do not hate or fear the artist in yourselves… Honor and love him do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow. Only the artist in yourself is more truthful than the night.

As the artist paints, he creates his own reality. He only needs inspiration, and all the boundaries between dreams and reality are dissolved so anything is possible.