I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.

I got a little studio in Chicago and practiced. I realized I had to earn some money. So I went to work for an advertising agency where my job was mostly drawing insects for a company that sold an insecticide spray.

You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn't go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.