“My paintings are the last paintings one can make.”

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.

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.

Consuming is not the aim of life. Earning as much money as one can is not the real purpose of life.

I still do my comedy and my performance stuff and my acting so it’s not all-consuming. But I do find myself drawing more and more these days.

But what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are.

Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history.Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.