“A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.”

Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.

It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn’t understand at the time.

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

All art is based on nonconformity … Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

The moving toward one’s inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

Content may by trivial. But I do not think that any person may pronounce either upon the weight or upon the triviality of an idea before its execution.

If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.

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

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

In our lifetimes, we can only know a small portion of what exists. The world is endless and its treasures are inexhaustible.

I have experienced a lifetime of real moments, and many of them were happy moments.

Luckily your lifetime warranty on your heart is still in effect. Of course, that becomes void and expires when you do.

Why did everyone think i needed a new boyfriend? I didn’t need a new boyfriend. I’d had enough of boyfriends to last a lifetime. The only thing a boyfriend was good for was a shattered heart.

I have more ideas than I’ll ever be able to write in five lifetimes.

God has opened many doors of opportunity throughout my lifetime, but I believe the greatest of those doors was allowing me to be born in the United States of America.

Coronavirus may well represent the biggest health crisis any of us experience in our lifetimes.

But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.