Make a painting you can work on for a long period, and make it look like it doesn't show any effort.

My mother thought I would have a hard life as a painter. My father thought the highest thing a person could be was an architect. Below that was a painter. So he thought it was much better than being, say, a doctor.

A New York audience generally likes decorative paintings, and decorative paintings go with the couch. If you change the couch, you change the painting. And when you're coming up, and the paintings aren't first-class decoration, you're at a disadvantage for publicity and sales.

Actually, you want to go into an area where you're frightened. Otherwise, you're just going to be repainting beautiful paintings, but a little duller each time.

Picasso and Matisse were the guys I wanted to get away from, and cubism is all still lifes. Their paintings are all closed drawings. And still life is a perfect form for that. By the mid-'50s, I sort of dropped the still life. The large picture was a way of getting around them, too. The abstract expressionists were also into the large form because it was a way of getting around Matisse and Picasso. Picasso can't paint big paintings. Matisse didn't bother after a certain point.

The abstract expressionists had that thing of, subject matter becomes content, content becomes form. And I always thought there was no room for style. I felt with my painting, the style really is the content. The style holds everything together.

Most contemporary artists are behind the bubble in time. They're making videos that are so incredibly boring compared to a good movie. Or they're making work where I say, "You realize minimal art is 50 or 60 years old?" That's what I tell people to shock them. They just blanch.