"I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it."

“When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.”

“URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST”

“I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be.”

“My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, "Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was.”

“I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case.”

“I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.”