Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

Art is the highest form of hope.

It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.

A lot of different things had to come together over the years, accumulated experiences of a general and personal nature, before the idea and the decision were developed and then carried out.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

A hero is not know by the number of battles he has won, but rather by the kind of battles he chooses to fight.

Leaders act with visions

There is nothing about you to be embarrassed about

[I]t would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools.

If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.

The 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bore God. The 12th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thyself.

I'd like to be an American Catherine Deneuve. She plays beautiful, sensitive, deep parts with a little bit of intelligence behind them.

Nixon regarded himself as having been cheated by life. He never got my vote.

Since the age of three I have refused God nothing.