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.

If there's no unity in your work, then you've deliberately made yourself into that kind of person. You don't want that unity in your work. You've made some kind of satisfactory arrangement with your culture.

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.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

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.

About three years went by and I had become exhausted - really at the end of my rope almost - and I thought I couldn't last much longer... and at the very end, when I thought of giving it all up, suddenly I thought it was good. I knew that I now understood something about it and I painted it as easily as you can imagine.