If you didn't know what you were trying to do, [Robert von Neumann] wouldn't say a word. He would just turn and walk away. So you very quickly learned to think that you'd better be attempting to do something in that painting class.

Living with [Bernard] Leach, who thought about pottery 24 hours a day, was a fantastic experience, and we really began to get inside his mind and understand what had motivated him to work all his life as a potter.

[Shoji] Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.

[I made in army] all sorts of dumb things, but it did teach me a lot about the silk-screen process.

In fact, [Bernard Leach] was several generations removed from us. At that time we were there, I think Alix [MacKenzie] and I were 26 and 28, and Leach was about 63, and we thought he was a very old man. I used to always want to help him up the stairs in the house for fear he'd fall. Actually, he was in excellent condition and lived to be much, much older than we ever expected.

When we worked at the pottery, we did learn to make pots, that is, the physical act of making the pot. We learned to control clay, to put it where you want it and not just wherever it wanted to go, and that was valuable. At the end of about six months, though, I think if that was all we had, we may have been inclined to leave because the workshop did not challenge us so much as living with [Bernard] Leach did.

We had a wonderful trip, a seven-day trip, talking and sitting in the sun and so forth [with Bernard Leach]. And as we were approaching England, Leach said, "Do you have a place to live?" And we said, "No, we didn't." We hadn't worried about that. But Bernard had just separated from his second wife, which we had not realized, and Bernard was a person who could not stand to live alone. So he said, "Would you like to share my house with me?" Naturally we said yes.