“One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.”

I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.

I had only planned to strike the gong violently in order to somehow shake people up and make them more aware. I think I succeeded.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

The best way to begin is to say: ‘Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings’.

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of…kitsch.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

As “Calvin and Hobbes” went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity.

I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it’s not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.

Something about glamour interested me. All my schoolbooks had drawings of women on terraces with a cocktail and a cigarette.

I didn’t always spell my name Bil. My parents named me Bill, but when I started drawing cartoons on the wall, they knocked the ‘L’ out of me.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

Drawing is the most inalienable medium. It is private; it practically doesn’t have an audience in mind, just the artist’s expression.

When I was in high school at Northeast Catholic in Philadelphia in the late ’30s, I found that drawing caricatures of the teachers and satirizing the events in the school, then having them published in our school magazine, got me some notoriety.

I’m just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that’s my way of thinking.