“Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.”

“Let us not mock God with metaphor,Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages:Let us walk through the door.”

“An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.”

“I had to stop selling stick-figure portraits of women at the beach, after too many customers complained I was making them look “too fat.”

“I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.”

“If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.”