"My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details."

"The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness."

"I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music."

"I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness."

"For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings."

"What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'."

"Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension."