To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.

I am not strong on perfection.

Everybody is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.