I am not a representative of anything. When art historians or critics or the public put somebody in a drawer like this, it has a tranquilizing, paralyzing effect. Artists are individuals. They have ideas, and the conventions for one's self as an individual are not for a group. There are always those who follow the group, but they belong in the margins. I refuse to be placed within, or added to, one particular school.

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.

When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

A painter doesn't need any talent. In fact, it's better not to have it.

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.

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns.. your thought process goes on.