Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

Andy [Warhol] was on the scene, but he wasn't an artist at first; he was more an illustrator. He was always surrounded by about ten people who worshipped him. He'd go to a party and they would all come along. But he was drawing shoes and that sort of thing.

I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.

I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.

I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.