You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.
Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.
The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.
I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.
To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.
A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
I think words come between the spectator and the picture.
I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.
I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.
I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?
It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.
Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.
My pictures really finish themselves.
I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.
I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.
I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.
I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.
I never think that anything I do is courageous.
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