When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.

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 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.

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

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two; eat one and drop the other.