I guess I've always liked the idea of being an artist.

One night in the early sixties I passed something on the Long Island Expressway just before the Queens tunnel that I must have seen for years. The billboard advertising cigars, Dutch Masters. I realized it was sort of perfect. It's weird isn't it? You're looking at Rembrandt - in neon! It was too much, it was irresistible.

I spent seven months in Africa and came back saying there isn't anything you can say about black people that you couldn't say about, say, pink people except that they're black.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

I remember everything I know even the most superficial things. And what comes out is in my canvases.