You always have the memory of the bottom, and fear of the bottom. And when you start going to the bottom you panic.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

Pulling yourself up again is the most important part of your life. Getting out of the bottom that you put everything into - yourself!

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.

You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

The religions never wanted an art where you paint only what you see.

I painted myself out of my painting.

What the soul hardly realizes is that, unbeliever or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.

A fearless mind is fearless because, it cannot see anything different from it. Fear of superiority and power comes only when we begin to differentiate.

My body has certainly wandered a good deal but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

I've been interested in dreams myself for a long time, and it's a big part of the Indian tradition, especially where I was brought up in Calcutta in my family, which is quite traditional.

No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.

Never quit. Never give up. Fly it to the end.

Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

I've got over so much. Mum wouldn't want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again