Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

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.

Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.

It's sometimes better to pretend I don't hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.

She took a leap of faith and grew her wings on the way down.

Look at the newborn baby. It struggles to breathe after living in the womb. And yet, growth comes as a result of struggle. Even when we talk about jihad. We need to attach consciousness to struggle. This struggle has to be both individual and collective.

L.A.'s always been good to me.

Blues was made for the recessed.

Be generous with your time and money - it has an amazingly fast payback. Be in the moment with everyone you love - and this frequently means tuning out work completely. And drive slow in parking lots.

The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'

Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.

I don't hate redheads! The millionaire men - wealthy men - never pick them. Every time I offer them they say no. I could say the most gorgeous redhead in the world and they'll say no, they don't want it. Now if you ask an Irish guy in Ireland, he says 'yes,' because that's indigenous to that country.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.

We cannot win this war on terror if people are undercutting us. And one way to undercut us is to empower Iran.

On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.

Paying interest on reserve balances enables the Fed to break the strong link between the quantity of reserves and the level of the federal funds rate and, in turn, allows the Federal Reserve to control short-term interest rates when reserves are plentiful.

Simplicity should not be identified with bareness.