I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

I have a timetable, but no routine.