“In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.”

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.

Art is the residue of vision.

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn’t it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. So long as I’ve learned something about why.

This means trying to bring values into environments, buildings, and contexts that improve the quality of life for future generations.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

All the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing.

When a man jumps out of a ten-story building.

I’m trying to get some building work done at the moment.

Filthy McNasty’s and I said, I need these things and now fill it in with other iconic buildings.

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

And there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven.