I am isolated as an artist, not as a person..

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling..

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture..

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits..

My pictures really finish themselves..

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers..

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms..

I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously..

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object..

A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid..

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything..

I think words come between the spectator and the picture..

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings..

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed..

Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them..

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period..

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient..

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else..

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species..

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute..

Eventually, a collection ceases to be a personal indulgence and assumes its own identity. In fact, it becomes a thing in its own right - rather like ….