It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.

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

When I found the beautiful white bones in the desert I picked them up and took them home too...I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness - if he had it he wouldn't be a good soldier.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.

Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn't a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.