You could own coins but you couldn't have bars of gold. We were on the gold standard. I think it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard.

Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?

I've often stopped working for long periods.

New York is dead. It's too expensive.

I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward.

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

I didn't study the piano - the piano studied me.