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.

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

I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

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."

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.