 Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers. |
| I think that words are often extraneous to what I do. |
| I hate painting. Topics: Short |
| I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?' |
| I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits. |
| A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy. |
| In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute. |
| In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like. |
| I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period. |
| My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything. |
| I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient. |
| I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself. |
| Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten. |
| I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me. |
| A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object. |
| The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed. |
| You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture. |
| I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings. |
| When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else. |
| I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback. |
