Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

If I had to compare myself to another artist, I wouldn't. I feel like my lyrics are really strong. I'm good at painting pictures and telling picture stories.

I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

I make sure I make a painting - that's my job. And I cook the Sunday dinner.

Life is a painting, and you are the artist. You have on your palette all the colors in the spectrum - the same ones available to Michaelangelo and DaVinci.

How do you make something the same but different? That's the question I had to deal with in my approach to the cover painting for 'Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes.' I wanted it to have many similarities to 'Percy Jackson's Greek Gods,' but I knew they couldn't be too similar.

Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

I have a Damien Hirst spot painting which I love. It has pride of place over my dining-room table.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

The paint is something we need to defend.

I can paint in jail.

I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting - or the frame of a film - to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.

Don't put needless expense into painting a head! Don't try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!

Painting contains a divine force which... makes the dead seem almost alive.

Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.