Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.
I have a book of buildings from 25,000 BC. These are huts built out of mammoth bones. These buildings were beautifully made, from the bones of the body into shelter.
The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.
But if you can find that spot - I suppose it's like running - I used to be a swimmer and swim laps, and you just have to be there with what you're doing.
An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
But I was very, very unhappy because my mother was very charming and generous, but to me, very dominating.
I will listen to a beautiful person much more quickly than a plain person, and I have to learn to be nice to people who are not attractive looking.
I'm not the kind of artist who has an idea and then carries it out; it's more like I find what the idea was through doing the paintings.
Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.
I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.
I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am interested in. I don't care about motorcycles and Armani suits.
Any artist who goes to Las Vegas is an idiot as far as I am concerned. Whoever goes to Las Vegas can stay in Las Vegas.
Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
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.
I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me,so natural to my way of being and thinking.
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.
