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.

There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.

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 work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.

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.

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

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