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.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape.

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting.