I don't think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.

If somehow I can, before I leave this earth, combine my absolutely mad freedom and excitement with truth, then I will have done something.

I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.

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."

I think you have to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn't work

I don't really have studios. I wander around - around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.

I can't work completely out of my imagination-I must put my foot in a bit of truth-and then I can fly free.