I'll never have enough time to paint all the pictures I'd like to.

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique...

To achieve the structure it takes a damn long time, so my paintings are always in work for a very long time—sometimes a year. Not that I work on them every day. I will have them, and then come back to them after a year, and also return intermittently. It’s not easily done. I am not able to do “one, two, a painting.” I try to do it very quickly, but it doesn’t work with me. I simply can’t do it. Very often people look and say, 'Ah, fantastic! That’s a beautiful painting.' But the moment they are out the door I start working on it. I rework it.

I don’t really the count hours I put into my paintings, to be quite honest. I suspect I might be surprised at how many it takes for an average artwork, because before I even begin painting I’ll tend to ‘lose myself’ in making the drawings and corrections and variations involved in the preliminary stage.

I don’t have much time for the idea that art is some languorous thing on the sidelines, and that you have to wait 50 years before you address a subject…

I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at all. The painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there, became more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory. Until finally it became obvious that there had to be a better way.

There may come, or perhaps has come, a time when no further progress in truthful representation is possible. There are those who say that such a point has been reached, an attempt to substitute a more and more simplified and decorative calligraphy. This direction is sterile and without hope to those who wish to give painting a richer and more human meaning and a wider scope. No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design.

Well, I think my paintings are fast enough already...

I regret I no longer have the years of youth needed to create a beautiful series of views of this place, which would in any case be rather difficult to paint due to the monuments, which require a good draughtsmanship and long stays in the city, like Ziem used to do in the past.

I see the future development of painting taking place in workshops.. ..not in any holy temple of the arts. Painting is manual labor, no different from any other. It can be done well or poorly.

I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man’s 'time' limits him; it does not truly liberate him. Our age – it is of science – of mechanism – of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage.

You start with a detailed charcoal drawing and then paint over that—the most distant thing first. If there are no clouds, the sky may take no more than a day. The distant figures may be done in a week. It gets more difficult as you approach the foreground—a large canvas may take four to six months altogether— but the most economical way is to finish as you go. At least that's what / was taught.

Painting doesn't interest me.. .What I paint is beyond painting.

When one is painting one does not think.