“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.”

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.

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

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.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.

I like my men like I like my roses . . . by the dozen.

One man and a dozen fools would govern better than one man alone.

A wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states, would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors.

Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. But our minds move in a dozen different directions.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.

I had been playing for a while, and I asked Louisville Slugger to send me a dozen flame treated bats. But when I got it, I realized they had sent me a box of ashes.