This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

I've not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.

An empty canvas is full.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

the great Judge rules with justice.

If thinking should precede acting, then acting must succeed thinking.

If you dare ask questions, you will find the answers.

A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all:That would have been too much like dying

Turn the cell into a classroom and the prison into a university

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

I write in Times New Roman, 12 point, and arrange the margins so that the screen looks like a page from a book. This spurs me on to make the writing as perfect as I can make it.

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves.

I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I've spent in Chapel Hill, N.C.