I read somewhere that Rubens said students should not draw from life, but draw from all the great classic casts. Then you really get the measure of them, you really know what to do. And then, put in your own dimples. Isn’t that marvelous!

If you’re an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Man’s own form in space – his body – was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery – because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.

Yes, I am influenced by everbody. But every time I put my hands in my pockets I find someone else’s fingers there.

I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in – like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn’t matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

I think I’m painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

I don’t paint to live, I live to paint.

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something – a member of a team writing American history...

If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody’s nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today.