The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.

There is more power in telling little than in telling all.

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.

I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.