Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.

Any artist can't get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you're only interested in what you're doing right now.

The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.