“Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.”

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.

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

The Pentagon isn’t a place that champions individuality and innovation.

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

What is the use for a man to have at his disposal a large field of action, if within himself he remains confine to the narrow limits of his individuality.

Whoever has recognized the vainglory of individuality will not attach any store (“n’attachera aucun prix à”, Fr.) to fame.