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.

Nothing in the world excites the culture today so much as a question. A question seems very appropriate to whatever you have in mind. Allowing your work to remain questionable is a way of satisfying your cultural condition.

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.

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.

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.

So now, how did God produce this world?... The fable is that he breathed upon us. In his breath, his wind, came moisture and things began to grow... a message of hope. Nothing physical. How do you intend for your breath to become a work of art? The only way I can see it is that you prevent your breath from becoming a structure. As soon as your breath takes on the form of a room, you are a carpenter; you're not God.

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