Being bad. Discomfort with your body. Bad self image. All those things turn you into an artist. The same things that keep you from being in a proper marriage.

All accidents and experiments, and discoveries, are what my work is about. The problem that I have as an artist is being way too critical.

It's more this instinct to get in trouble, and then get myself out of trouble. That's what painting is for me.

Every painting I've ever done has like 100 paintings under it.

The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.

That’s the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? You’re done when you don’t want to do it anymore.

I've never read a book on shape. I've read books on gesture; I've read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I've never read a book on what a shape is.

A lot of what I do in my work is taking a thing and either washing it off, scraping it, covering it, scraping it and then washing it, turning it upside down. Making it somehow blind.

I have jeans with holes in them and I have nice jeans. I have casual and I have dressy jeans. I've got all kinds.

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

I don't want to sit around and hope good things happen. I want to make them happen.

God made us walking animals - pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.

But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.

Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.

Poverty, the mother of manhood. Also, the mother of prostitution.

The trick isn't adding stuff, it's taking away.

You don't get heaven or hell. Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman.

And I could write it better than you ever felt it.