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

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

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 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.

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

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

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.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

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

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

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.

Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

The days you work are the best days.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

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

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

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.

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.

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

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

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

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

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.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.

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

War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness if he had it he wouldnt be a good soldier.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it its your world for a moment.

Its not enough to be nice in life. Youve got to have nerve.

Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.

They call it golf because all the other four-letter words were taken.