What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

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.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.