If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

Work is my joy... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.

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.