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

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.

Anyone who doesn’t feel the crosses simply doesn’t get that country.

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 don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

Failure’s relative. I’ve always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something’s not right about that. It’s how you treat failure, too.

This is something I learned only too well years ago when I did a fundraiser for Pol Pot. A few years later I saw ‘The Killing Fields,’ and I’ve got to tell you, I just felt like a schmuck.

At ‘SNL,’ I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in ’95, I could let my own beliefs out.

We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. We weren’t rich – but we felt secure.

I’m almost forty years old and I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I felt like, “Okay, I’m ready to do this.”

I felt validated and valued , and here was this woman [Whoopi Goldberg ] inside my television screen who gave me a voice.

For me, I never ever felt the ownership or any identity with any community of disabilities. I didn’t grow up being told that I was a disabled child.

Everyone felt like they knew Ray Charles and in a way they did, because he was embodied by his music.