If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

I'd rather do that than build chicken sheds no-one wanted!

I was about 14 when I realised I didn't have the same personality type as the people I grew up with. I wanted to be a really amazing artist – I wasn't like, humble, you know? I don't really have a logical comprehension of other people, I don't understand how other people are. I knew I was never going to be normal: white picket fence, get married, have three babies. I just wanted to nurture animals and have a miniature pig and miniature horse and a little cow and a couple of puppy dogs. That was way more interesting.

If I had not become a painter,
I would surely have become a clown..
.. because I make people laugh..
..Faces deformed
by suffering, humour or work.
Often crazy. They then became imaginary,
when I adorned them with movements
free colours depending on the head. The
colour too become clown-like

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.

I cannot say why I wanted to paint. The only answer is in the pictures themselves.

I probably could've done this earlier, if I was more ambitious.

Some two or three months after I arrived in prison [in 1959], I felt a desire to paint and with it came a refusal to surrender to the status quo…I would go up to the roof of the building to paint anything I could find, eventually painting the inmates.

You know, I wasn't gonna wait around. And I thought, 'You know, what I'd like to do if I have my choice, I wanna go to Big Sur and go back to painting.' For better or worse, I left Hollywood. I let in very few people in my life, and I got involved with animals in my life. And not just cats and dogs. I had to learn who I was again through animals, because animals know who you really are.

Without my husband I would never have become a painter, and without me he had probably not become a painter. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)

If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.

I have loved enough women to know how to paint.
If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

I realized that If I had to choose,
I would rather have birds than airplanes.