It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.

I kept.. ..returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.

One hundred artists introduce us to one hundred worlds.

I can not evolve any concrete theory about painting.

I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished.

One can begin a picture and carry it through and stop it and do nothing about the title at all.

The large gray spiked form rising from the bottom of the picture is to me the symbol of death and ruin. And finally the black ovoid form is the symbol of fire, lava and destruction.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

The eye seems to be responding to something living.

There is always an unconscious collaboration among artists.. ..the artist who imagine himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool.

In the beginning I drew and painted from nature in order to know her. Then later, only to fall under her spell. And today, to let her mirror my thoughts and feelings.

Let the poet dream his dreams. Yet, the poet must look at the world must enter into other men's lives must look at the earth and the sky, must examine the dust in the street must walk through the world and his mirror.

As for the subject matter in my painting.. ..it is very often an incidental thing in the background, elusive and unclear, that really stirred me.