The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

There's something peculiar about artists. They have ups and downs... After a while everything you do is just wonderful... then you slide back. If you're a good artist you're going to go down. And then it's up to you.

When you don't know how to pick up a brush, you don't know anything; at that moment you're an artist. I'll simply say, 'If you know less, you're better off as an artist.

Pulling yourself up again is the most important part of your life. Getting out of the bottom that you put everything into - yourself!

I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

No one escapes that moment of innocence when the world attacks him and installs within him the spirit of opposites... As long as everything within you is saying yes and no, dark and light, with big earth-shaking ideas, you come nowhere near art, I think. Light and dark don't exist for us as artists. Light is something given to you and you're allowing it to pass through.