I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

Hope is that tiny flame in a candle that continues to glow even after the wax around it has melted.

The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.

Don't it make my brown eyes blue?

The spirit of seeking understanding through personal contact with people of other nations and other cultures deserves the respect and support of all.

Shouldn't letting go be painless if you've never learned how to hold on?

I can have incredible self-discipline. But see, I think it's obviously a form of stupidity.

You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes - and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done

There is enough time in every day to do God's work...in God's way.