Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.
I work day and night without sleep. The paintings keep me fired up.
I worked like a crazyman. I worked day and night, often days and nights at a time - without sleep. Gallons of coffee kept me awake; the paintings kept me fired up.
Color in color is felt at any and every place of the pictorial organization; in its immediacy - its particularity. Color must be felt throughout.
In the bedroom darkness I may visualise a way of making a painting. I can see it - if I do this and this and that and this, my God! Why haven't I seen this until now? I can hardly wait to get to the studio and make the vision real.
I think of painting as possessed by a structure. . . but a structure born of the flow of color feeling.
There is value in long years of obscurity, if one doesn't go insane or suicidal, in that, simply because nobody is looking, the habit of fooling around and trying things out gets ingrained.
Mick Jagger's lips' so big, black people be going, "You got some big-ass lips!"
My favorite thing in the world was to make people sing - until I made people laugh. Then that became my favorite thing in the world.
We're getting bad people out of America, people that shouldn't be, whether it's drugs or murder or other things. We're getting bad ones out. Those are the ones that go first. And I said it from day one. Basically, all I've done is keep my promise.
For me, the promised land, always seeming just beyond my reach, is the poetic masterpiece, that perfect union of words in cadence, each beckoned and shined and breathed into place, each moving in well-tried harmony of tone and texture and meaning with its neighbors, molding an almost living being so faithful to observable truth, so expressive of the mass of humanity and so aglow with the beauty of just proportions that the reader feels a chill in his legs or a catch in his throat.