“Beauty is not like a superlative of what we imagine, a sort of abstract type we have before our eyes, but on the contrary, a new, unimaginable type that reality affords us.”

“There is a saying that beauty will save the world. But who will save beauty? I think when you sit down at the piano and write music you are trying to do just that.”

“There is a sort of innate optimism in all works of the imagination.”

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”

“My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further; my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”

“In order to become true to character, they [actions] have to be repeated, the repetition attemptng to discover what is constant . . . This is why de Kooning painted by repetitively redoing the same strokes, waiting for the self-consciousness of the performance to collapse in the arduousness of its rehearsals, for the epiphany to come”

“I like the idea of working an idea again and again, because it allows me to carry an idea further than just doing one-shots. When I work within these groups, I set up a series of, you could say, arbitrary rules of what the line is going to do, and what shape the form is going to take . . . That sets the logic about the shape while there is another logic informing the line; it is going to touch on all four sides or something — within that interaction there’s always variation and possibility.”
”Your art opens these other doors that have always been there.”

“I did not want to banish objects completely . . . objects, in themselves have a particular spiritual sound . . . Thus, I dissolved objects to a greater or lesser extent within the same picture, so that they might not all be recognized at once and so that these emotional overtones might thus be experienced gradually by the spectator.”

“Shape is the first element in my work; I would not say it is the most important, but everything starts there.”

“When you see a fish, you don’t think of its scales . . . You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through water . . . If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape to reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.”

“One of the glories of Brancusi’s work is that it makes you stop thinking. You just love it. It’s that simple.”

“I ought to say, that it isn’t just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it’s a Boat, and sometimes it’s more of an Accident. It all depends . . . On Whether I’m on top of it or underneath it.”

“. . . it is selection and placement that will make of anything a sculpture . . .”

“Visualize painting [art] as the mobile positioning and partitioning of component parts of materiality. Houses built by man’s labor and apricot trees by nature’s formula and the artist making them all his own by controlling their motion . . .[like] a conductor leads an orchestra.”

“. . . they [the drawings] were the means of knowing objects, and the better to remember them. ‘Deep within himself . . . [the artist] must have a real memory of the object and of the reactions it produces in his mind.’ Drawing would provide that.”

“. . . drawings are, like islands, places to lose your bearings. But they are also a bit like maps, marking out that most enigmatic space between making and looking.”

“... painting is something that takes place among the colors, and . . . one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves...”

“I carry my landscapes around with me.”

“[The drawing] becomes a kind of path created in a place without visible landmarks.”

“I place air in my works. They are my windows viewing infinity. ”

“True strength is delicate.”