Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.