To paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of se — Cy Twombly

"I think of myself as a Romantic Symbolist."

"I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you cant be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; its impossible, thats the first thing you should know."

"Its a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I cant take the time because the idea doesnt correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks.. .So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks.. .And I did those charts, big palettes.. .two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. Its instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but its like coming through the nervous system. Its like a nervous system. Its not described, its happening. The feeling is going on with the task."

"Im drawn to the primitive, the ritual and fetish elements."

"I respond to the Greek love of metamorphosis."

"I work in waves because Im impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties."