I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

I believe that to do anything in this world one needs a love for risk and adventure, and above all, to be able to do without what middle-class families call "future."

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.