HOWARD HODGKIN

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'

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

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

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

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

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

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.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?'

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

In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.

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.

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

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

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

I hate painting.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

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