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 wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.

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

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.

What you have to do is break all the rules.

Most artists look for something fresh to paint; frankly I find that quite boring. For me it is much more exciting to find fresh meaning in something familiar.

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."