I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

I tend to like things that already exist.

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.

I never wish for critics.

I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.

Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

One works without thinking how to work.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

I am not strong on perfection.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

Androgyny is not trying to manage the relationship between the opposites; it is simply flowing between them.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

I am playing with the assumptions that we have in our everyday life when we are tripped up or fooled and we learn something, that makes things exciting - I am having fun with that stuff, but you have to manage it so it doesn't get too cute, that's what I trying to work toward.

'Thou shalt not get found out' is not one of God's commandments; and no man can be saved by trying to keep it.

Well, I think that those of us in public life that are trying to do a good job, and that are faced with this popular new game that the media has of being critical of everything that anybody in public office does probably are thin-skinned.

When Frank the Pug is singing I Will Survive, the only reason it's funny is that Will is in that shot trying not to get angry. A shot of a dog singing I Will Survive on its own will not get a laugh.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.

I'd been trying for all of the eight years we'd been married to have a child, and finally I did.

Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records.

Uhm, I'm the one wanting the lessons! I don't want to say too much about it because I'd rather have you see the movie, but he's trying to find his music.

So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it.

I've always done food that can work in a set time frame. The message I'm trying to get across is, it doesn't have to take three days to do this. With planning, you can do a lot and really have quality food every day.

I meditate a lot, but I am constantly in pain. I'm trying to live with this. You just have to accept it.

I trained and trained and went up against Kurt, then being a world champion in '94, and after that I did Tommy's tour and then my tour and all this stuff and just trying to deal with it all. And now, I've just kind of backed off a little.

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.