Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It’s something quite extraordinary.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it’s five, or thirty seconds and it’s just a different bed for...

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

Curiosity is the main energy…

I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do...

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made – I try to act in the gap.

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I’ve been here for four...

I wouldn’t use the same color in a picture in more than one place.

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don’t maintain constantly the you can’t refer back from one area to another area.

Pollock also… wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.

The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in,...

I’m not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or...

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

I’m sure we don’t read old paintings the way they were intended.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you’re soliciting...

An empty canvas is full.

Every time I’ve moved, my work has changed radically.

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don’t want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.

I don’t mess around with my subconscious.

I don’t think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.

A newspaper that you’re not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn’t think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

If you don’t have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.