“The mind will say this forever. But I mostly fish rivers these dayas. In so doing, movement becomes stasis, flux is the constant, and everything flows around, through, and beyond me, escaping ungrasped, unnamed, and unscathed. The river's clean escape does not prevent belief in its reality. On the contrary, there is nothing I love more than the feel of a wholeness sliding toward, around, and past me while I stand like an idiot savant in its midst, focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic bits of what is so beautiful to me, and so close, yet so wondrously ungraspable.”

“I figure God's a creative guy. So when he comes down and lives with us in disguise, he can't help leaking creations here and there. Either that or he's an idiot. I haven't decided yet. Not a normal idiot- an idiot savant. God, idiot savant, what's the difference?”

“I can't help it, Kate. And I'm laughing at me. I feel like one of those sappy men who run around with a big grin on his face all the time. I feel like grinning all the time around you, and it's so idiotic.”

“So quietly flows the Seine thatone hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a greatartery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over meitseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would beable to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appearnegligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything theyneed to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, thechanging climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.”

“I wrapped my arms around me as tightly as I could, and stared up at the stars. Had I not been so cold and wanting to escape so badly, I could have stared at them forever: They were amazingly beautiful, so dense and bright. My eyes could get lost up there if I left them looking long enough. [...] They swallowed me up. They were like a hundred thousand tiny candles, sending out hope.”

“I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”