I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.

I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.