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.

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.

My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

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

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.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.