“Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.”

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more

Making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea… The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.

My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.

So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.

The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.

I’ll buy metaphor, but simile’s a cop-out used by scaredycats who won’t commit to anything. Simile’s for cowards.

The word “souvenir” has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless.

Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.