I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings.

Any artist can’t get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you’re only interested in what you’re doing right now.

I was worried in the ’80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

It’s hard to say that my twenties were the most miserable time in my life or that my first wife drove me crazy or that I hated the job that I had. You can say all of those things. But for the most part, people manage to have a good time when they’re that age.

I think for a lot of artists, if you’re lucky enough to have a kind of career, especially toward the end, you start to think about what the whole ensemble looks like. It’s the whole that counts. The parts are given, but you don’t know how the whole thing’s going to look when it’s all put together.

I don’t like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it’s hard to be old and like what goes on around you.

There’s a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn’t make me well known – they made me notorious.

When I’m painting the picture, I’m really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don’t get any thrill out of laying it out.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can’t stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.