I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.

When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.

I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion.

I don't think there was really a time when I have not been politically aware.

Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem.

I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

We all make mistakes, but the people who thrive from their mistakes are the successful ones.

Urgh — essence of Millicent Bulstrode.

I see a clear breach of ahimsa even in driving away monkeys; the breach would be proportionately greater if they have to be killed.

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.