Author

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.

I hate painting.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

Howard Hodgkin