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

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.

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.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

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.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

The very words he uses are designed to awaken in them a new sense: the sense of the eternal.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

These … tables (values of trignometric functions), constructed by means of new techniques based principally on the calculus of differences.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

The normal routine is always the same thing whether it’s on a new movie or a new job

In private (Jerry Vines was with us), I asked Rogers what he did with the slavery passages of the New Testament.

I like to travel all over the world and learn [about] new cultures.