I started collecting my artist friends, artists like myself who nobody had yet noticed. In everything, all I am collecting, so to speak, are my friends - artist friends.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

I don't paint over my paintings with black paint. I paint black paintings. It isn't because I'm sad, just as I didn't paint red paintings yesterday because I was happy. Nor will I paint yellow paintings tomorrow because I'm jealous.

I do not have a philosophy about retrospectives. Of course, I cannot change what I have done. What I am doing today, this I can change, in view of whatever I have done before. My retrospectives are like a series of ghosts.