“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.”

I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.

It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.

It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.

The apprehension of… values is intuitive; but it is not a built-in intuition, not something with which one is born. Intuition in art is actually the result of… prolonged tuition.

Form is the shape of content.

The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time.

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 they gave me that trophy, bro, I cried.

I left Mainz after 18 years and thought, ‘Next time, I will work with a little less of my heart.’ I said that because we all cried for a week.

If you haven’t cried deeply a number of times, your meditation hasn’t really begun.

I smiled, danced and cried my way out.

There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting.