A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

You sort of fell in love with Jane when you met her. She was exuberant, original, strong-minded and a very kind woman.

There are infinite modes of expression in the world of art, and to insist that only by one road can the artist attain his ends is to limit him.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.

The artist who imagines that he puts his best into a portrait in order to produce something good, which will be a pleasure to the sitter and to himself, will have some bitter experiences.

I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.