I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.

To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.

An artist needn't be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

My brushwork is quite unsystematic. I slam the paint on in all sorts of ways and leave each result to take care of itself.

I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.