"In 1946 it was the first time I saw a Van Gogh, a painting from his years in France. It was excactly what I had always felt here : infinity, the unimaginable. I was bewildered and thought: who has been painting here for God's sake? Pink stripes in a green sky, you can't imagine! Ultramarine and carmine in the soil with a big yellow sun behind it.."

“I feel responsible, because so many people are leaning against me. Of course I can not take that pole away from them, they will fall over. I can see that those people need it! An ongoing struggle, an ordeal - because, if I say something I have to make it happen. In this way, painting is a religious matter. My paintings create a consciousness that offers comfort.. .It must appear in the light. Somebody of eighty years old who never ever would think about visiting a museum. Recognition!”

“I was sitting in the barn, drawing a dead bird which I had put on a box. Then the barn door opened and Kees entered .. ..He came down next to me.. ..After a short silence he said: 'Are you painting? '.. .. it looks somewhat like that bird'. I said: 'To me that means a compliment Kees, because I am trying to draw that bird.' Stunned, he looked at me and asked, "Why are you doing that?" What could I answer? I said: Actually, I don't know myself'. Then he hoisted himself to his feet and said, I'll bring you the stuff next Monday' and he went to the door..”

“One afternoon I went to visit him. . I knew he was home, I took pen, ink and my sketchbook with me and did half a liter of gin in my pocket. He lived in the back of an alley and was sitting in his chair by the window.. ..I told him, 'You will get the whole bottle, but one condition. I want to make a beautiful drawing of you, so first you have to sit still for twenty minutes and look at me closely. If I look at you and you don't look at me, the deal is over.. ..'Okay', he said. I never had a model like him before.. .Stock-still he sat.. ..and looked at me without a single blink of his eyes. Within half an hour he was there on the paper - razor-sharp.. .While I am writing this down, it is as if he is sitting in front of me again..”

“As far as transience is concerned.. .You see the whole story in those shoes, that's why I paint them so accurate. The physical attitude; crooked legs, a lump. Those shoes were talking to me, and then I thought: I can see that you were so and so big, but did you also had a wife? Children? What were you doing? And what really mattered to me is my own place between them. Between those stories, that mystery. That pitch-black background - I had found it. A cry for attention. Those pants, that shirt, that background, that was: here I am. But then it become mannerism. So I carried on realistically but avoiding the black background at all costs. It is as Rutger Kopland says: Whoever found it did not look well. Now I want to paint people like this, like they are made of colored mud. Color spiritualizes.”

“Just six kilometers – never my world was bigger than that, actually. That starting time , to which I return now; watercolor; I prefer a bit foggy, a small world - and not the cows themselves, but only their traces in the mist. The tenderness.. .I am currently deeply immersed in little trees and in the reeds. You have to experience it as mysticism, as a miracle. And afterwards: passing it on..”

“I worked for months on this painting , for instance that well-bucket on the wheelbarrow I painted a twenty times or more, and it is constructed exactly as nature has shaped it. I want to make it harder and harder for myself. 'That's how it is' doesn’t exist for me. Deepening, that's what it is all about. My wish is to make in due time a small painting in which I can hardly discover any longer that it is painted, that it is just there, like that. Just something very simple.”