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

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

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.

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

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.