You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.

One must be of one's time and paint what one sees.

You cannot really believe in the existence of a foreign country until you see it.

So in the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places.

My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.