I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

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

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

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

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.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.