Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

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.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

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.