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 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.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

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

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.