"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."

"I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient."

"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 find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing."

"I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period."

"Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten."

"A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy."

"I hate painting."

"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."

"My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms."

"I think that words are often extraneous to what I do."

"In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like."

"I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits."

"I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me."

"I think words come between the spectator and the picture."

"I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'"

"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."

"When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else."

"In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute."

"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."

"I am isolated as an artist, not as a person."

"My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything."