No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.

I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

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

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.

Any artist can't get away from the way the world works, which is that it wants to know what you did, and you're only interested in what you're doing right now.