"My psyche was scarred in my art student days in Europe, just after World War II, by an ineradicable memory of war-wracked innocents.  In their eyes lurk all of mankind's questions and answers.  If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young, he wouldn't need a road map.  I wanted other people to know about those eyes, too.  I want my paintings to clobber you in the heart and make you yell, "!"

“We don't criticize them, so why criticize Walter Keane just because his symbol of humanity is a child?”

“I don't really care what people think of me.  Whatever anyone may say, I've helped the whole art world, just as Picasso and Dalí have.  I've made people aware of painting, which makes them buy more, just like they go buy more records and books once they're exposed.”

“Let's face it, nobody could paint eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane.”

“But it was a real nightmare when Walter threatened to kill me and our two daughters if we told anyone.”

“It takes dispassionate bravado to speak of oneself in the third person.  Walter has such bravado: it is one of the chief reasons for his success.”

“Well, I first, uh, started doing this after World War II when I was kind of tramping around France, Germany, and the lowlands, and I came upon these frightened, waif-type children, and, uh, they actually looked like rats running around and they acted like it.  And, uh, I started painting this type of thing of these chi—these children, they didn't even seem to know why—these children didn't even seem to know how to talk; they couldn't even pray.  And it started like, uh, an artist work—it-it does—you don't know how to talk about it, but the painting can talk for you, and I think this is the difference between an artist and a poet and a writer: in other words, an artist, uh, paints what he has to say, where other people do it in, uh, in more verbal type of…”