“Ken Noland would use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle [of the painting] because it's the easiest way to get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of the canvas. If you're that much involved with the surface of anything, you're bound to find symmetry the most natural means.”

“But there was something else that the Abstract Expressionists taught us: they began to use something besides the conventional means of art; to want other kinds of paint, or kinds of canvas, or ways of making pictures that weren't the usual ways. Some of the next generation, the Pop Art artists [like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, picked up this attitude and began to put actual things into art. We [=w:Morris Louis and Noland] were making abstract art, but we wanted to simplify the selection of materials, and to use them in a very economical way. To get to raw canvas, to use the canvas un-stretched – to use it in more basic or fundamental ways, to use it as fabric rather than as a stretched surface.”

“Gleizes was only trying to reduce the curvature of natural volumes to adapt them more naturally and rigorously to the surface of the painting, a surface which he believed to be continuous with the wall and, for all practical purposes, with no curvature at all.”

“I always get into arguments, with people who want to retain the old values in painting — the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object..”

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”

“Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be.”

“No age is wanting in able men; it is the duty of wise masters to find them out, win them over, and get work done by means of them, without listening to the calumnies of selfish men against them.”

“Find out what people want to do, then tell them to do it. They'll think you're a genius.”

“You can live your life two ways: You can use your language to manipulate. You can use it as a tool to get what you want. But the problem with that is that it assumes you know what you want, and that you're right. And that's a problem, because there's lots of things you don't know, and if you get what you want you may find that (A.) You didn't really want it, and (B.) that you're not the person that started the journey towards that. That happens a lot to people, especially when they use their language in a manipulative way.”

“I was embarrassed by it and racked by middle-class guilt. But when you're on stage, if you're trying to be something you're not, it becomes so much harder. It's better to be honest and take every vulnerability and flaw you have, and mock them and deal with them.”