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.

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

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

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.

You have to become complete in some way; a universe - a complete thing in yourself - in order to reach across and breathe some unity onto this thing you're faced with. If you intentionally avoid that unity that is within yourself then you will avoid unity in your work.

Painting is... a correspondence between what you are and what you see. It's a moment when something is holding together in such a way that it is a universe in itself... Within this is a test and also a judgment upon yourself, your capabilities, your promises, and the part that you play in the world. And nobody else can test that for you. Certainly not the Museum of Modern Art.

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.