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.

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.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.

Control of vibrato helps your musical expression.

Art is an expression of who you are. Parts that I play are my sculptures.

If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world it will come through the expression of your own personality, that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature.

The early expression of my youth was filled with all the aspects of art.

In America it's live by the sword of freedom of expression and be will to die by it as well.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

I think they saw me as something like a deliverer, a way out. My means of expression, my music, was a way in which a lot of people wished they could express themselves and couldn't.

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

Until fighting ends and there are conditions, which allow the free expression of will by the people, there can be no elections and elections are not held in these circumstances anywhere in the world.

The modes of expression of men of genius differ as much as their souls, and it is impossible to say that in some among them, drawing and color are better or worse than in others.

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.