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 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.

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

I never think that anything I do is courageous.

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

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.