I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.

I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.

The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.

I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.

On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer.

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

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