I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there

Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings

Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later.

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

You see what you know!

Once I really started to understand Frank Stella's work and follow it, there's a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept going forward.

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.