Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

We'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz)

I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught - not like what I had seen - shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.