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It is very difficult to make the ideas in my head come to life, but what is harder is making them look effortless.

Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.

When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

You know, it's a hugely difficult thing to take any work of art or drawing and say 'make that real.'

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

Paper and ink are all but trash, if I cannot find the thought which the writer did think.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.