Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.

I haven't sufficient interest in objects or anything I can see around me to do what Oldenburg does.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

They certainly aren't connected with the old geometric art. My work isn't geometric in that sense.

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

The attitude and capacity of the factory, the old metal table and the new ideas of the wooden furniture quickly and naturally suggested the possibility of metal furniture.

Well, its very exasperating when you can't get it right.

Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

Stuart Davis has more to do with what the United States is like than Hopper.

Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

And then we moved to New Jersey and I went to the Art Students League.

Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.

Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.

I think most of the art now is involved with a denial of any kind of absolute morality, or general morality.

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

I don't think geometric art is... I don't like to call it that. I don't think it's any more pure than pop art or anything else. It doesn't have anything to do with purity.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

Usually when someone says a thing is too simple, they're saying that certain familiar things aren't there, and they're seeing a couple maybe that are left, which they count as a couple, that's all.

You're only dealing with whatever you know, which is a very small part of it and later on it'll look like it has something to do with the period. Obviously, the artists have something to do with one another. They tend to set up certain common qualities among themselves.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

After all, the work isn't the point; the piece is.

Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.

I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys.

That other saying, I'm a part of all that I have met, I think that would have to begin with my wonderful parents back in Atlanta when I was a youngster five years old I was tongue tied.

But clearly at the same time you've got to get out there and connect with voters and actually respond to the needs, the frustrations, whatever problems their now saying are not being adequately solved.

The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong.

I am saying pornography hurts anyone who reads it, garbage in, garbage out.

I was in the middle of a crossroads, which is a nice way of saying crisis, physically, emotionally and spiritually. You know the physical part. We just talked about it.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

A salute from this corner to President Bush for saying he was willing to investigate raising or eliminating the cap on salaries subject to the Social Security tax.

Love in the real world means saying you're sorry 10 times a day.

I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an easy transmission and sometimes it's a difficult one but I love the power of saying it so I'm gonna do it whether it's hard or easy.

And, quite frankly, I fully expected to be charged with murder, because they weren't charging anybody. I did it in terms of, I felt like I was throwing down the gauntlet saying look, this is what happened. There's a family out there that needed to know what happened.

I know I stand visibly onstage, but my function is still unseen, because I rarely see the immediate results of what I am saying or doing or writing.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

You know it's hard to hear what a bearded man is saying. He can't speak above a whisker.

We had an eyeball-to-eyeball agreement at a restaurant before I came back that, if I came back, he would never talk to me that way again or I was simply saying no.