[ Bernard] Leach was the one who taught us that, because he, too, had started out as a painter and an etcher and had only gotten into ceramics by chance when he was in Japan trying to teach the Japanese how to do etching, which, as he said, they were not ready for yet.

Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.

Bernard's [Leach] drawings delineated every little accent on the pot, every subtle curve and change of angle and proportion and all.

Every pot is not going to be a masterpiece.

I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.

There were a lot of artists in St. Ives. In fact, since the time of Whistler, St. Ives has been noted as an artist colony.

In school we did all sorts of things, molds, slab building. We were not very proficient on the wheel because the woman who taught was not proficient on the wheel. And so we learned from her assistant who had learned from her assistant the year before and so on, and that was not very good training.