“Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.”

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

Marks on paper are free – free speech – press – pictures all go together I suppose.

It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

The days you work are the best days.

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.

I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.