“I had been making dramas for some time and suddenly I wanted to change, I wanted to have new feelings.”

Source: Poison

Source: The Fountainhead

"One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)
Context: I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

"Princess Diana: 10 most inspiring quotes from the 'people's princess'", Hello Magazine, Daily News (1 July 2015)

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

As quoted in Contemporary Artists: A-K (2002) by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, p. 680
Context: I feel that we are living a very fragmented life; the whole world — you too. So I perceive the world in fragments. It is somewhat like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. A person can be very, very tiny. And a billboard can make a person very large. You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure — that doesn't deter me in the least.

Letter to his attorney, Yahya Bakhtiar, after his death sentence, as quoted in My Dearest Daughter : A letter from the Death Cell (2007).