For me context is the key - from that comes the understanding of everything.

With artists of my own generation there was at first no group identity - and never a clique.

I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.

Context begins with other artists - seniors and mentors.

As time goes on, I realize more and more that, beginning in the early 30's, David Smith began setting the precedent for what was to come later for many of us.

Pollock was well known, certainly, but for all the wrong reasons. He was known as much for being wild and unconventional in his working methods as for being a great artist.

Usually I throw away what I don't get right the first time.

I've also been willing to share any help that I could give to any other artist.

I met David Smith through my former wife, Cornelia, who'd studied with him.

In the '50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.

And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly

No nation is drunken where wine is cheap and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is in truth the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing - harmony of life.

I would collaborate with James Franco as a rapper any day.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Sorrow was made for man, not for beasts; yet if men encourage melancholy too much, they become no better than beasts.

Be moderate in prosperity, prudent in adversity.

Just believe in your dreams.

All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.