Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else

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.

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.

Success is a worn down pencil.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.