And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, circa 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.