"I have painted like an ape. The ape phase is in all my work. My first lick of paint is the ape phase, from that I grow towards a more intellectual phase, involving the lines, the rhythm. From that phase I grow towards mankind, for that is where the power of my imagination lies. It no longer has anything to do with reality, even though the world is present in it - for we recognize people, animals, plants, you name it."

“I'm able to paint so nice and thick with those big splodges that stay upright because I mix my own paint. I use the formula that the seventeenth-century painters used and I've added one or two things myself. A very important element is stand oil. I once got hold of a whole barrel full and I'm still using it. There are pots of it in all my studios, in New York, in Connecticut, in Monaco, and in Tuscany. stock that had been there since the seventeenth century.. .I mix my oil paint with it, and I throw in a lot of eggs and some concentrated turpentine. It's as thick as homemade mayonnaise. When it dries it is as tough and hard as rubber.”

“Our civilization is in a continuous state of self-repair. Maybe you have undergone surgery once. In former times you might have died. Today everybody can live on and on; everything around us is repaired, even the spirit. Look at the young artists. They only paint the facade and not the things hidden behind it. I don't say that life is lost its originality. I show straightforwardly the state of repair of civilization.”

“My work is in a complete transformation. Lately, in my studio in Amsterdam, 'beings' re-emerge more and more, but I have repainted all the canvases that I have brought with me . It is matter itself. On the canvas, no discovery, no personal drama, no submission to a rhythm.. ..freed from 'Victory Boogiewoogie' , bepop, bepop, we free ourselves from rhythm, we are not there yet, but it is coming.. .Now I paint stains, bigger stains, colours endlessly reapplied one upon the other, I scrape and I put down new stains of colour unto nothing remains but one great plane, concentrated and linked at the same time, suddenly a vivid red or yellow and the canvas and being merge.”

“To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.”

“The duty of the artist is not to be calculating in any sense, so that he may be free himself of human emotions while carried by the universal forces of life. Only then does one not think about making art, or about styles, or directions. Something comes about, something happens.”

“..because I live in Paris, but just outside Paris at the start of Yonne, I have a barn, a very, very big barn.. ..right near Auxerre, a barn forty meters long, six meters wide and fifteen meters high, and I do all my work there.. it's like a large street, you know.”