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

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.

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.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.

All art is based on non-conformity.

It’s funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind.

We are trying to do as much of this as we can in the public eye transparently.

It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn’t do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes.

Stay in the Word. The moment you start letting go of that, you’re on the road to compromise.

When you do what you want, not what you wish…’ said the first raven. ‘When you no longer seek your reflection in others’ eyes…’ said the second.

When I was a small boy, old people used to squat down to my eye level and ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, to which my answer was invariably, “a pirate.”

But just as we begin to enter on the history of physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part,

There’s a very Neanderthal quality that still exists in a lot of men… And if you’re in the public eye, to me, it’s very boring to say what you have to say and be media trained to the extent that you don’t ever reveal any truth.