We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.
I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.
Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.
When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays...
I want to know one thing, what is color?
The path to youth takes a lifetime.
When you’re really young, you’re young for life.
When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.
They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.
An artist must forget painting when he paints. That’s the only way he will do original work.
That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.
I am exhausted if I don’t work.
In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.
I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I’m like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn’t matter which wine.
If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.
Lord, protect me from what I want!
In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be.
Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.
My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.
For being a bad student I was banished to the ‘calaboose’ – a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping.