I love painting the way one loves the body of a women.. ..if painting must have an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make… - Robert Motherwell

All my life I've been working on the work - every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so as an approximation keeps you going.

Compared with Brancusi, Matisse, Miro, I'm a barbarian. If people would understand the barbaric force of my paintings, instead of always pointing out how well I understand Picasso. I'm a Viking who has read French literature.

A modern painter may have many audiences or one or none; he paints in relation to none of them, though he longs for the audience of other modern painters.