“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.”

That’s an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are.

I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.

There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you’d want to suggest someplace, but there’s no place. I wouldn’t know where to send a student to study.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

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.

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.

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

I can’t pretend that I don’t subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.

The idea of being a foreign correspondent and wandering the world and witnessing great events.

The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.

I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.

You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.