One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfact… - Mark Rothko

I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the pulsating concreteness of real flesh and bones, its vulnerability to pleasure or pain is nothing at all. Any picture that does not provide the environment in which the breath of life can be drawn does not interest me.

It's a risky business to send a picture out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who could extend their affliction universally!

[the first ingredient of his work]... is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality.