When you don't know how to pick up a brush, you don't know anything at that moment you're an artist. I'll simply say, 'If you know less, you're better off as an artist.

Each of us has a universal within us. There's always that making of parts - but it doesn't touch the universal within you.

I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.

As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

Nothing in the world excites the culture today so much as a question. A question seems very appropriate to whatever you have in mind. Allowing your work to remain questionable is a way of satisfying your cultural condition.

You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

I'd fallen asleep thinking I was much too tired to go on working and if I went on working, I'd lose it. I'd get a better hold of it in the morning feel stronger. But I looked and looked at it and it seemed to me there was nothing to do.

Pulling yourself up again is the most important part of your life. Getting out of the bottom that you put everything into - yourself!

There's something peculiar about artists. They have ups and downs... After a while everything you do is just wonderful... then you slide back. If you're a good artist you're going to go down. And then it's up to you.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

From the very beginning, art meant something very important to the people who made it. It was a correspondence of the emotions to what you saw it wasn't knowledge. You were being at one with something eternal something outside of yourself. And no matter how many fake things have been brought in to suit other conditions... That is still true.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

It's absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy your paintings think. They just don't have any possible idea of what happens to you and they're really not that interested. As a matter of fact, they hate the idea that anything really happens to you. They want you to be a genius and that's it.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.