“My landscapes have always been imaginary, invented and reconstructed. I look and I impose and then I decompose them and then I recompose them. In the taking apart and putting back together, the emotional glue–the cement of abstractions that hold reality together–gets worked in and, I hope, becomes an integral part of the reconstruction. Thus the imposition becomes an exhibition of what we were talking about. Landscape, like form, is everything to me.”

“What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of the fathers—erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.”

“And what’s the use of talking, if you already know that others don’t feel what you feel?”

“I typically arrive three years too late. I wish I had been able to sit in that white, aromatic kitchen and look you in the face but I was not ready. I was still on my way.”

“This is not your problem. You have your own body to deal with. The lamp by the bed is broken. You are feeling things he’s no longer in touch with. And everyone is speaking softly, so as not to wake one another. The wind knocks the heads of the flowers together. Steam rises from every cup at every table at once. Things happen all the time, things happen every minute that have nothing to do with us.”

“Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, “Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.” So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.”

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

“When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.”

“I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware.”

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

“If you’re happy in a dream…does that count? The happiness–does it count?”

“the slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.”

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

“When I imagine myself I am barely there.”