“I wanted to build up a name for myself.”

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.

Most Young Kings Get Their Heads Cut Off.

Fire will attract more attention than any other cry for help.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work.

I don’t think about art when I’m working. I think about life.

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young.

My favorite Twombly is ‘Apollo and the Artist,’ with the big ‘Apollo’ written across it.

I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.

The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings.

I cross out words so you will see them more

The more I paint the more I like everything.

I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.

Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix…

Every single line means something.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy.

I like kids’ work more than work by real artists any day.

To the oppressed with no seat on the table; dreaming of change and better days, I will pull up a chair, and light fires in your name.

It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defence, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defence of our nation worthwhile.

In my dreams we got past the parking lot; you took me past the old, oak door, led me up onto the vacant altar, and offered me to every god whose name you invoked as you worshipped my body.

When I was a young man, I was poor. In a war with other nations, I was in eighty-seven fights. There I received my name and was made Chief of my nation. But now I am old and am for peace.

You’d be doing me a favor if you called me Wyatt or Earp, but not both.”

Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.

If my name were John D Smith IV I wouldn’t have been elected to anything.