I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.

Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.

I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.

The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.

The military is already sexually integrated.

I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet-tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.

If it were possible for me to alter any part of his plan, I could only spoil it.

And he says I have lousy timing

We're in a situation now where fewer and fewer small films get made. People want these big giant tentpole sort of things, and I don't know, it's getting harder and harder to make a small movie.