Chuck Close

“What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.”

“Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.”

“Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.”

“I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.”

“I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am interested in. I don't care about motorcycles and Armani suits.”

“I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn't draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.”

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.”

“It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.”

“You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.”

“I'm very learning-disabled, and I think it drove me to what I'm doing.”

“I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.”

“I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.”

“I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.”

“I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.”

“A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.”

“Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don't apply to you.”

“In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.”