Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way — things I had no words for.

I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models, and they don’t move.

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Marks on paper are free — free speech — press — pictures all go together I suppose.

One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue — that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.