“Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”

“Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.”

“I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.”

“Art is either a complaint or appeasement.”

“I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life. ”

“My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.”

“I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.”