I am not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell I am interested in? I must be interested in that process that I am talking about.. I don'… - Philip Guston

Man is not supposed to make life. Only God can make a tree. Why should you make a living organism? You should make images of living organisms. It seems presumptuous to attempt to make a thing which breathes and pulsates right there by itself. It's unnatural. What's inhuman about it is, the human way to create, I think, the way we see, from part to part. You do this and then you do that, then you do that and that. Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where even though you naturally have to paint, after all a painting is only a painting, the painting is always saying, what do you want from me, I can only be a painting, you have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point That's some kind of a leap.. ..I'm describing the process of painting.

Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me [in creating a painting] is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that's the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I'm telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I don't know... .Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I don't understand it. II really don't. I don't know whether it is fragmentary [as David Sylvester the interviewer suggested]. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there.

I mean that the things I felt and that I enjoyed about certain painters of the past that I liked, that inspired me, like Cézanne and Manet, that thing I enjoyed in their work, that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself, even though it was a picture of a woman in front of a mirror or some dead fish on the table, the pictures of those men were no pictures to me. They felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface. That's truly to me the act of creation.