Quotes from Eric Fischl

I think making art is something where you think you know, you also know you don't know and you hope - all these things are in play all the time. I think it's what makes the excitement of creativity for the artist.

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.

What experience has shown me is that it takes your life to become an artist.

Artists don't really want to be marginalized. They believe that everybody should be able to appreciate the experience that an artist gives them, an experience that connects us to each other in a deep way.

Every work of art falls short of what the artist envisioned. It is precisely that gap between their intention and their execution that opens up the door for the next work.

In Paris, we spent hours at the Louvre examining great works by Géricault, Trioson, Da Vinci—the Mona Lisa was surprisingly small but had yet to be cordoned off and encased—and Ingres. I remember marveling at Ingres's Valpinçon Bather.

One of the things I love within music and within sports is how often musicians and athletes thank their audience. In the art world, you would never hear that.

The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

Artists of my generation were not educated. We were not given the equipment because it was generally believed to be irrelevant.