“If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.”

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.

The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.

I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.

The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward.

Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto… has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.

Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.

An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn’t mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

For 14 years, I’d been on medication for the pinched nerve, the arthritis, the muscle spasms in my neck, and I’d lost my tolerance for pills. If I had a single drink, the alcohol, on top of the pills, would make me groggy.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

While I’ve found many of the religious shows I’ve viewed over the years not to be to my liking, or in line with my own beliefs, I’ve never considered it my place to exert any greater type of censorship than changing the channel, or better yet – turning off the TV completely.

I started out coming out of college, I had my realtor’s license and I did real estate full time for a number of years.

I go to dance clubs…about once a year just to justify the other 364 days I spend in my apartment going ‘God, what idiots!’

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

I got this big fear of doing smoking jokes in my act and showing up five years from now goin’ [puts mic to his neck and speaks as if he had a mechanical larynx] ‘good evening everybody, remember me, smoking’s bad. [puts cigarette to neck and mimics smoking it] Eeww.

If I get married I get a tax break, if I have a kid I get a tax break, if I get a mortgage I get a tax break. I don’t have any kids and I drive a hybrid, I think I should get a tax break.