Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch... And it's at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.

Have you noticed that bones are always modeled and not carved, that you always have the impression they come from a mold, that they were first modeled in clay? Any bone you look at, you always find fingerprints on it.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

It takes a long time to become young.