Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.

Making art is like swimming underwater in a blindfold.

An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open.

No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.

Most people find facts irritating. Facts interfere with their systems of denial.

What is sublime? / the artist said. / I haven't time / to be well read. / To be sub lime / I'll place, instead, / green citrus fruit / upon my head.

Always let intuitive perception precede analysis.

Postmodernism is Modernism with Alzheimer's.

Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.

When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.

Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

A problem is something you can do something about. If you can't do something about it, then it's not a problem, it's a predicament. That means it's something that must be coped with, endured.

There is no improving the future without disturbing the present.

And yet here I am. Broken and bleeding on the inside, heartsick, I am here.

Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.

What I most wanted even at that early age, was to capture and hold the truth, with the certainty and love that it brings.

When you're in love you're living, you matter.

Emotions aren't doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings.

Nobody makes a movie about a woman in her mid-30s who wishes she could have met someone to have children with and still doesn't know where to find a date.