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.

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.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

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.

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

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.

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.