Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

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

In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

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

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