Quotes About Perception

If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different - a different attitude or brushstroke. 'Hamlet' is like an entire gallery of old masters.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.

I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, 'This is cute!'

No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.

Sometimes people only see horrible, terrible things in my paintings.

I don't really look like people in films; I look like people in paintings.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

A lot of my paintings have quite negative meanings, but painted in a bright and cheerful way.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I've done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.

Nobody complains that Bernini's sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell's paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We're trying to make a new art medium out of robotics.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

My paintings are very much about the consumption and production of blackness. And how blackness is marketed to the world.

A lot of people tell me that my paintings are sad-looking, but they're actually more pensive than sad. They're very colorful and that says a lot about my disposition in life, how I'm very hopeful.

I don't feel I can get used to my face wearing glasses... more than one pair of glasses, or any one pair until a cataclysmic, cosmic event causes me to get a new pair.

No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.

Pakistan hasn't been cast in the role of... interesting cultural place or, you know, land of great comedians.

The impression of Pakistan is that people are corrupt. I don't think they are as corrupt as they are made out to be. I can look you in the eye and tell you I've never bribed anybody.