I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

I've not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.

An empty canvas is full.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

At 23 I thought I knew everything, by 33 I realised I knew nothing.

I think people make their own faces, as they grow.

Never feel intimidated by defeat nor death, but rather intimidate life with your dreams.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President.

The elms of New England! They are as much a part of her beauty as the columns of the Parthenon were the glory of its architecture.

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Christ's work is a kind of deterrent to us, and a way of upholding the justice of God's divine government of the world.