“If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets.

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

If I’m going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity.

Do not be afraid of perfection – you will never attain it.

I do the same thing everyday. I go to work and paint. I try to turn out as many pictures as I can.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

When I work I forget all the rest.

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.

While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.

The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it.

My dad is Caucasian, and my mom is African American. I’m half black and half white. Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating.