I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

Any gastronome who is not an environmentalist is stupid, and any environmentalist who is not a gastronome is sad.

Jane Austin was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.

I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.

The August Decrees were an improvised parliamentary reaction to an emergency situation.

It's just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That's how life works.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

Racism springs from ignorance.

Super excited about things I'm going to do; never excited about things I'm actually doing.

Cuz I was never pretty anyway and never cared anything about that.