I am not academically trained, so my portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting. That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives.

     When you sit for an hour and a half in front of somebody, he or she shows about twenty faces. And so it's this crazy chase of, Which face? Which one is the one?

     In my head I am in one of those Buddhist caves where you see a thousand Buddha faces on the wall. In my head I am on my seventeen-year-old acid trip, when I saw my personas fall one minute after another, as if I was dying every moment.

     When I look at a drawing of a person, I look at that person as living. I don't know how to explain it, but a photograph to me is always a reminder of how the person was on a certain day in that certain light fixed. When I look at a watercolor' of that same person, it seems to me alive, more open than a photograph.

     There's poetry in the world. Poetry doesn't belong just to the poets. You know, you can look at the most premeditated, cold blooded movie and find poetry in it.

     To me the poets are closer than I am to the idea of voice, to a sort of primeval song that we all participate in. Maybe they express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.

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