The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings. Keep my mouth shut. You'll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again, people will always tell you about it. Even if you were the source of what's wrong with it.

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.

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.

It's hard to say that my twenties were the most miserable time in my life or that my first wife drove me crazy or that I hated the job that I had. You can say all of those things. But for the most part, people manage to have a good time when they're that age.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

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.