“I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.”

Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit.

I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.

Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they’re not at all the same. But they’re both symptoms inside the white male power structure.

At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.

I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of madness.

People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich – don’t want to buy anything.

I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.

I want a storm to come and flood us into a song that no one wrote.

Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

I was a child who went about in a world of colors. My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants.

I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It’s about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

That’ll be the day when I die.

A physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.

Cantona’s expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.