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

Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.

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

My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.