If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass? There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting's no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That's what looking is.

I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.

The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.

When I first came to New York, I knew some painters older than myself. I was kind of the kid who was allowed to hang out with them. That is more the way people talked in those days, it was perfectly normal to question a work's fundamental premises and its fundamental visual manifestations. It was perfectly okay to say, "Oh, that should have been red" or something like that. In a funny way, the way artists talk about art is to de-privilege it.

I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.

What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible; it's not the end of the world.

I have a terrible confession to make, sort of like those people who say that they've been mispronouncing a word all their life: I've never read Ways of Seeing all the way through. I'm sure I carried it around with me in art school.