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

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.

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

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.

I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.

One of the most courageous things we do is change. If everyone says you’re wonderful every time you wear a red dress, and you change to yellow, that takes courage.

There is nothing a pig loves more than a good bath, with a loofah and plenty of soap flakes … There is something delightfully lovable about a really clean pig, in clean yellow straw.

As far as playing, I didn’t care who guarded me – red, yellow, black. I just didn’t want a white guy guarding me, because it’s disrespect to my game.

We’re all Africans, everyone – black, white, yellow.

Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

I never identified with anybody. I have always been very sensitive about my color, because everybody called me ‘yellow gal.’ I was caught in between both sides – nobody wanted me. I love that my audience is there, but I always feel as though I have to fend for myself.

My uncle’s dying wish – he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair.