On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, "Well, I don't have to talk much."

If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

I've always been interested in space in pictures. I think my going deaf increased my spatial sense, because I can't get the direction of sound. I feel that I see space very clearly, and that's because I can't hear it. So it's a compensatory thing.

It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.