Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it to kill it to rid it of its soul to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

I want to start my own airplane business. I'm going to buy two Dakotas paint them up in war colours and do er nostalgia trips to Arnhem - you know where the old paratroopers used to go - and charge them about 20 quid a time.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

For far too long we've allowed the other side to paint us as racist as sexist inhumane war mongers - well today as a conservative black Republican and former solider I'm here to set that record straight.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

If there were only one truth you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

The more you travel the better you get at it. It sounds silly but with experience you learn how to pack the right way. I remember one of my first trips abroad travelling around Europe by rail fresh out of high school. I brought all these books with me and a paint set. I really had too much stuff so I've learnt to be more economical.