"At my age , you realize that some things have caught you. You can see that as a positive or a negative. On the negative side: Are you in a routine, unconsciously adapting to things that work well?.. ..The black Masonite .. ..by not painting them black and instead making them beautiful, I’ve wondered if I have sold that particular idea. Edvard Munch, as he got older, sat at his home and painted like a wild man. Those works were not very popular and have come to be considered the 'wrong' Munch. But that’s how you need to be when you get old. I call it the arrogance of age: You don’t need recognition. You just don’t care."

“..I also got to meet w:George Maciunas, the father of Fluxus. I wanted to know what this Fluxus was, so I asked him, 'If I put salt in a tea bag and then into hot water, then the salt will dissolve, and when you pull the bag up, there is nothing in it. Is that Fluxus?' 'Let’s make that one right away,' Maciunas replied. And it became a Fluxus object. I told him that I was a painter and that I would keep painting. 'Well,' he said, 'that doesn’t matter, as long as you do it the right way.' Getting to know him, I understood that the right way was with a certain sense of justice.”

“What I am after is 'bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth'.. .I do not seek truth before bravura, I seek it on the other side. Naturally it is a basic risk to run, the internal insecurity, where nothing is measurable, no solid standard exists any longer, and one can hardly discern the difference between commercial bravura and true trapdoor, but it is the only way of escaping good taste and narrow certification. The light of ambivalence is a heavenly one.”

“I have a garden and across the road, a park. I never go for walks, but I look out the window and 'ask for permission' as I call it. If I need some green, I find it there. In that sense, I’m a very old-fashioned painter, tied to nature. But I remain modern in that I execute some rather impious structures. I will react if I feel that my paintings, though abstract, become too naturalistic. I have another studio in Italy and I worked a lot there this summer. I still depend on my surroundings, so some of my work was very influenced by the Italian landscape, its olive trees and the very cold green color of the leaves. You could identify the specific landscape in those paintings and it drove me crazy. So I had to destroy them. But even destruction can still help underline what is good about a picture.”

“I believe that painting, in our meaning, is structures. Each application of paint to a surface is structure. This is, of course, self-evident, but a superstructure of meaning can occur. One can have various motives for doing it. And here that difficult motif comes in. I believe that a ruthless accumulation of structure reworkings leads to one meeting one's motif. One's life-motif, so to speak. That which one has and does not know that one has it. A sort of geology, as when, in a constant process, sedimentation and erosion makes the earth we live on like it is now, without any meaning in itself in a rational sense, but accepted as that upon which we live in this life..”

“it doesn't care too much if it's from the 60's or from last year - it's kind of the same thing .. ..apparently there are certain structures, certain ways of organizing a painting that's there, that I'm born with as a painter.”

“Painting is laying layer upon layer. Without exception it is fundamental to all painted pictures even if they look as if they were done in one movement. The movement has always crossed its own track somewhere. It is easy to understand that a picture is layer upon layer when it comes to Picabia's puzzle pictures or my own material works, but it is difficult with the 'synchronos'. By the 'synchronous' I mean all those pictures where all the layers aim at the same picture, where the under-painting and following layers – glazed or not – fall on top of each other. The 'unsynchronous' are the ones where each new layer is a new picture. It is like geological strata with cracks and discordances. But each new layer, however furious, is always infected and coloured by the underlying one. Even when it is slates where the previous payer is completely removed physically, wiped off.”