I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy - but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.

Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life.

The artist has to make the viewer understand that his world is too narrow, he has to open up to new perspectives.

When I talk of reality, I am always thinking of essentials. Profundity is not located in some remote, inaccessible region. It is rooted in everyday life.

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.

The highest wisdom adopts the humblest of bodies.

Painting quickly is a calculated act to block out rational thought.

A cross could be a shape for expressing something spacious; such as the coordinators of space. That could be called its first significance or its first relevance.

The tattoo can only exist as part of the skin, as a drawing always is an incision in the material and therefore cannot be parted from it.

I never view aesthetic ideas as having an existence purely of their own but as a function they have in connection with political or moral values.

My illusion is to have something to transmit. If I can't change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it.

So I placed my heart under lock and key To take some time, and take care of me But I turn around and you're standing here

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

And you finally get there, you reach a point where you refuse to feel anymore pain and the desire to chase happiness out weighs any choice that gives you reason to question where you're headed.

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

When things happen to you in the worst way, you live with it, you go over it, you think, 'What else could I have done?

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer.

I'm not the president, so the president, has top secret clearance immediately. I don't. It takes time.