In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.

A lot of young painters love to incorporate celebrity. One idea of being a painter is to use what's happening at the time. Velázquez was painting of his time. And so was Rembrandt. And Francis Bacon was painting his time in London. He was a real mover, but he saw the insect in the rose. But yes, when I do a painting, I want to take the "I did this" out of it. That's why I started using chance, like the markings on the wood. I never wanted to compose.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.

Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising.

My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.