Basically painting is total idiocy.

I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, circa 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.