To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they…

- Philip Guston

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

- Philip Guston

It is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each …

- Philip Guston

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with n…

- Philip Guston

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

- Philip Guston

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

- Philip Guston

That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.

- Philip Guston

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

- Philip Guston

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.

- Philip Guston