“Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.”

“Painting it's a blind man profession. Painter is painting not what he sees but what he feels.”

“What matters is not what you paint but what your hand dances. The painting is only a notation of the dance of the hand, of the gesture of love.”

“If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about [after Reinhardt's death in 1967].”

“Don't you know how to paint? My grandson will paint it better! What is this? Are you men or damned pederasts? How can you paint like that? Do you have a conscience?”

“I paint what you love to hate and what you hate to love.”

“See, I never understand why my paintings hold together because I don't have any tricks for doing it and that is usually what makes a painting academic. There were some well-known devices for making a painting work hold together, ave cohesion. This seemed to be organized. But I don't necessarily have to know what the mechanism is. For me, what it really is, is something you have in yourself that makes you feel, it gives the painting a feeling of unity, of oneness, and being of all of one piece.”

“Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set out to paint.”

“Paint what you like and die happy”

“You can't be in an unconscious state and paint. Because whatever is in your mind, and not the subject matter, but the feelings that you have related to that subject matter, is what you're going to paint. So, the beginning is not actually painting, you know. The beginning of painting is not you put down green, and then you like pink, and you put down pink.
Painting's not about that anymore than music is about this sound and that sound.... And it's something that drives you to expression. And it's irresistible.”