Artist Quotes

Basically, I viewed any work of art as an imposition of another person's taste, and saw the individual making this imposition as a kind of dictator.

At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.

Around 1967 I began backing away from dogmatic Leninism, not so much because I thought it was false, I just decided there was nothing utopian about it.

You can't smear acrylics, you know, it dries too fast.

When I'm makin' lectures to these universities, I tell 'em I like that little building because when I run short a audience, if I can get three people in there I've got a good crowd.

When I'm building my dome in my chapel, and I had a vision - I've worked on perpetual motion and I haven't never give it up yet. I still think it could be done, perpetual motion. I had a vision of a un resist able windmill.

Sometimes I don't even pull my shoes off for six weeks at a time, except, you know, just to take a shower. I just take breaks between 24 hours a day, just a break now and then, it don't take me long to rest; maybe 20 to30 minutes sometime, or maybe an hour.

My work begun to spread out. And calls to the universities begun to take me out of my garden, you know.

I never did buy things on credit, I always paid for 'em, because I can't see much difference in paying for something and just waiting a week and pay interest on it; that looks foolish to me.

I had a call to the University of Miami where I'd run a revival in 1950.

Every time that we've ever fought, we fought to keep from bein' destroyed. We've never started a war.

But, when I had this feeling and started painting sacred art, as I had this feeling to do, then it come to me: my problem is I'll get a lot of criticism and another problem is my work's not good enough to sell.

As for me, I'm just passin' through this planet.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, I'm not here to live a normal life. I'm sent here on a mission.

I came here as a man of visions. I was sent here as a man of visions, like a second Noah. I'm not a Noah but I'm here as a second Noah. I'm here as a red light is in the street.

Theology is anthropology.

If someone gives you so-called good advice, do the opposite; you can be sure it will be the right thing nine out of 10 times.

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

My work is a game, a very serious game.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

They look at someone like me, and I just really get up their nose. I really wind them up.

There's so much stuff said about me that's not true, so now if something is hurtful and wrong, I send an e-mail or letter immediately, saying, This is not true.

There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.