The following quotes were all found in this conversation with Chuck Close (via). Enjoy! (more)

“I just had at an Antique Road Show one of my things I made in junior college. They value it—total bullshit. The thing isn’t worth a dollar and a half. Nobody would buy the thing. I actually got eight dollars for it.”

“I have to say that I’ve been around long enough to have painting be dead four or five, six times. Always the best time to paint is when people decide that painting is dead because the traditions and conventions are up for grabs.”

“I know I wanted to make a big, aggressive, confrontational image that was Brobdingnagian in nature, as if the face were a landscape, thinking about Gulliver’s Lilliputians crawling over the face, knowing everything about that face, tripping over beard hairs, falling into a nostril, knowing everything about that face, and not even knowing that they were on a face.”