When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work.

I'd read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: 'I want to be part of that.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.

People refuse to believe that I've never been to Starbucks or Disneyland.

I have no social agenda with my work. I'm deadpan about it.