Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It's as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind

As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.

An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.

The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

What you conquer in your soul you conquer in your world.

Usually, the best thing is when the band goes to the bar and gets the corner table, we sit there like kings, and then they bring people to us. It's just rock 'n' roll. It's stupid, really.

Anger itself does more harm than the condition which aroused anger.

Love and appreciate your parents. We are often so busy growing up; we forget they are also growing old.

I must be right. Never an aspirin. Never injured a day in my life. The whole country, the whole world, should be doing my exercises. They'd be happier.

My father was a lawyer.

I used to hate to go to school, because when it was Friday afternoon and everybody was finished school, I knew I was going to work Saturday and Sunday.

Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.

Mum was the matriarch and the patriarch of the family.