“I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.”

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.

To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

Marks on paper are free – free speech – press – pictures all go together I suppose.

It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.

The days you work are the best days.

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.

I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

The normal routine is always the same thing whether it’s on a new movie or a new job

In private (Jerry Vines was with us), I asked Rogers what he did with the slavery passages of the New Testament.

I like to travel all over the world and learn [about] new cultures.

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation.

The worst form of badness is human goodness when human goodness becomes a substitute for the new birth.

The challenge, really, on any new film is to try to avoid that and achieve a few moments that aren’t cliche.