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.

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

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.

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.