I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

I surrender to the world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash - like something you caught out of the corner of your eye, but in the picture you can look at it directly.

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there.

To have all your life's work and to have them along the wall, it's like walking in with no clothes on. It's terrible.

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man. I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said, "You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well, but somehow you are different." "Ah," he said, "I don't think you should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers."