You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit.

You always have the memory of the bottom, and fear of the bottom. And when you start going to the bottom you panic.

Your culture demands that you bring some kind of crisis to your work and therefore you can not bring any unity to it. In order to bring crisis into your work you have to bring it to a state of expectancy. In other words you have to leave your work in the state of mind of being a question.

From the very beginning, art meant something very important to the people who made it. It was a correspondence of the emotions to what you saw; it wasn't knowledge. You were being at one with something eternal; something outside of yourself. And no matter how many fake things have been brought in to suit other conditions... That is still true.

I'd fallen asleep thinking I was much too tired to go on working and if I went on working, I'd lose it. I'd get a better hold of it in the morning; feel stronger. But I looked and looked at it and it seemed to me there was nothing to do.

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.