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.

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

If you know what you're doing, you're doing dull stuff.

You have to find what your temperament is like and live around it. I find I work really well off the top of my head because you get the unconscious into it. Otherwise, it's just an idea. And I'm not so hot there.

What makes everything one is the style.

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.

You have to be a little scared of what you're doing. Otherwise, you just paint the same masterpiece a little worse.