When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when … - Willem de Kooning

I feel now if I think of it, it will come out in the painting. In other words, if I want to make the whole painting look like a bottle, like a lot of bottles - for instance maybe the end of the day, when everything is very light, but not in sunlight necessarily - and so if I have this image of this bottle and if I really think about it, it will come out in the painting. That doesn’t mean that people notice a bottle, but I know when I succeed in it – then the painting would have this.

The pictures [De Kooning had] done since the 'Women', they're emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it. I am not a pastoral character. I'm not a – how do you say that? – 'country dumpling'. I am here and I like New York City. But I love to go out in a car.. .I'm just crazy about going over the roads and highways.

I admit I know little of Orient art. But that is because I cannot find in it what I am looking for, or what I am talking about. To me the Oriental idea of beauty is that 'it isn’t there'. It is in a state of nor being there. It is absent. That is why it is so good. It is the same thing I don't like in Suprematism, Purism and non-objectivity... I do like the idea that they - the 'pots and pans' [pictured in the classic still life paintings], I mean – are always in relation to man. They have no soul of their own, like they seem to have in the Orient..