The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

Every good painter paints what he is.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

My painting does not come from the easel.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Love is friendship set to music.

Art is coming face to face with yourself.

It abstract art should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

Bums are the well to do of this day. They didnt have as far to fall.

A canvas is an arena in which to act.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.