Most important, for openers, work six hours a day, seven days a week for six years. Then if you like it you can get serious about it.

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.

I like to make an image that is so simple you can't avoid it, and so complicated you can't figure it out.

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.

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.

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.

I use the iPhone now for information. But with selfies, I don't know what those people are doing. It's like they believe what they see is real, even with the [filters]. And God bless them! But to me, it's not a self-portrait, it's a reality project.