I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

I am an immigrant in a sense. What happened was that my father was stationed in New York when my mother became pregnant, and she said, "I've got to go to Sweden so this child can be born there, because you don't have any idea where you're going to be transferred next."

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.

The thing about the ray gun is, you pick up anything you see on the street that's the shape of a gun.

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.

Mine was not pop art. I maybe started with a subject, but I changed the subject.