Art critic David Sylvester's interviews with painter Francis Bacon, conducted over forty years of friendship and collaboration, provide the most extensive account available of Bacon's artistic process and vision. Bacon, whose figurative paintings depicting distorted human bodies made him one of the twentieth century's most controversial and celebrated artists, speaks with remarkable candor about his methods, influences, and intentions. Sylvester's questions probe Bacon's use of accident and chance, his relationship to photography, his views on abstraction and representation, and his obsessive return to certain subjects - the screaming pope, the wrestling figures, the isolated men in rooms. The interviews reveal an artist deeply engaged with art history, particularly Velazquez and Rembrandt, while committed to representing the human figure in ways that conventional painting could not achieve. Bacon discusses his technique of working from photographs rather than life, his destruction of failed canvases, and his sense that painting must go beyond illustration to create presence. This edition includes material from later interviews conducted after the original publication. For anyone interested in Bacon's art, in the creative process more generally, or in the possibilities of the interview as literary form, Sylvester's conversations remain the essential source for understanding one of modern art's most distinctive voices.