“I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.”

“It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love.”

“Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important.”

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

“Don't drink too much."
"When I can spell out your name in shot glasses, I'll stop."
"I'll have to get a shorter name."
"I'll have to forget how to spell it.”

“I'll know how outraged I am when I know how many black people were on those flights.”

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”

“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”

“It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.”

“How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to re-live them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.”