“I know that in my own work the best things are the things that just happened images that were suddenly caught and that I hadn’t anticipated. We don’t know what the unconscious is, but every so often something wells up in us. It sounds pompous nowadays to talk about the unconscious, so maybe it’s better to say ‘chance.’ I believe in a deeply ordered chaos and in the rules of chance.”

Francis Bacon quoted in 'Unnerving Art', article by Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Magazine August 20, 1989.