I wanted to learn how to paint rather than just doing black-and-white work.

Painting… in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

I write 2,000 words a day when I write. It sometimes takes three hours, it sometimes takes five hours.

Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world. Just start thinking peace, and the message will spread quicker than you think.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

I’ve always done everything at my disposal to avoid labeling what I do, or to avoid being labeled myself.

It’s a moment that I’m after, a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment.

So much of Jaws was amazing because the mind filled in what was missing.

Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.

Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must...

I’m not going to doubt my life.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look...

The small businessman is smart; he realizes there’s no free lunch. On the other hand, he knows where to go to get a good inexpensive sandwich.

But if I really want to produce my own work and tell stories, then I will.

I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

I suppose more than anything, it’s the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.

I’ve also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist.

True artists are prophets. I don’t want to be that prophetic in that sense because it’s so lonely.

Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself...

I don’t really have studios. I wander around around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.

I was lucky enough to be given books that weren’t top sellers; books that were kind of under the radar.

People were very affected by the war. But it didn’t mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn’t paint. But otherwise one continued.

Spreading the news is your duty as a Christian, and there are many ways to do this.

War is over if you want it.

I’ve always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.

I’ve been giving interviews for the last 25 or 30 years, more often than not answering the same questions over and over again, ad nauseum.

It’s all in how you arrange the thing… the careful balance of the design is the motion.

So there’s kind of a simultaneous aspect to pushing the boundaries, and being very safe.

I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church.

Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.

If your life changes, we can change the world, too.

I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don’t understand computers.

But there’s still an avenue for smaller comics and personal expression.

It would have been called provincial and barbarous; it would have been cited as an incident of low civilization to confuse such art.

To be quite honest, I’ve been very blessed when I’ve worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as...

In the ’50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.

We are all dreamers creating the next world, the next beautiful world for ourselves and for our children.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.

If somebody can inspire me, it feels really special.

The Jumble Shop would be one place where we’d sometimes accumulate down in the Village. I think it might be just a place that’s unknown that was right around the corner from wherever it was...

In all love stories the theme is love and tragedy, so by writing these types of stories, I have to include tragedy.

Why do they cover Paul’s songs but never mine?

I don’t think that I’m over his influence but they probably don’t look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

My impression, is that prayer is one of the most basic forms of magic. That it’s harnessing the powers of your mind.

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

So, when the special effects are at the service of the story and draw you into it, that is really the magic.

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It’s one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

The future is now.

Life with another person is always difficult.