Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.

I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.

I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.

I always have searched for a point of view that a participant could change.

If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.

Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.

The working process is ideally freeing my mind.

I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.

If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.

An empty canvas is full only if you want it to be full.

This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.

By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else

You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

Curiosity is the main energy...