I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

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.

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

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

Every  person’s  life  should  include  one  reckless  moment.

Mother Teresa would seek no other pulpit than the hovels of the poor, and no other sermon than her works of love, performed for the unloved, in God's name.

Perfect happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.

People talk about the businesses of the future needing to be more agile and more responsive if they are to be successful. But this requires a deep change in the way organisations work.

Only madmen and fools are pleased with themselves; no wise man is good enough for his own satisfaction.

Governments can't keep looking over the shoulder or at the constellation of stars. You have got to do what you have got to do.

You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time