“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

To me, it’s not work. When I draw and I write, I find it relaxing. It’s not like 9-to-5, where a man goes to a job and he isn’t really interested in the job. Luckily, I get paid for doing what I’d do for nothing.

I’m interested in taboos for certain reasons. They can dramatise things and they’re scary, and they’re important to think about.

I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.

And then you realize that your friends – your real-life friends – it’s not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you’re doing than how you’re doing.

I’ve been interested in that subject matter, like lots of people. Perhaps foolishly, I’ve allowed some of that stuff to creep into my music.

I get obsessed by little nerdy things in my corner that no one else is interested in.

So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

It was the dreamscape of the suburbs that interested me.