Robert Motherwell

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks-but never three.

One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

Collage is the twentieth centurys greatest innovation.

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

For a painter as abstract as myself the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.