I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

Good art is like a sexy pair of lips—it has the potential to say so much, but prefers to have you do all the talking about it. Also, good art is fun to kiss and...

The Dome.” Perfectly round, this room is one continuous curved wall of books. A copper dome sits on top with four stained glass windows fitted tight to allow for natural light to stream in. The...

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why...

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a...

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface… but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words...

There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.

The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth...

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are...