If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.

As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.

An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.

The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.

Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

Move on. Life won't wait for you.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Having a baby, it's like a five year commitment.

I think the people we meet in life and the loves of our lives are very, very important in what we become, like change us - when it's right, probably change us for the best.

what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

The structure of human betterment cannot be built upon foundations of materialism or business, but upon the bedrock of individual character in free men and women.

I always thought that I was me — but no, I was you and never knew it.

Most of the volcanoes are pretty far away. You have to go to, God knows, Alaska. Or you have to go to the Southern Indies or you have to go to a specific island.