“Catch things that have been falling for a thousand years.”

Wayne White

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“I think van Gogh was one of the great, great draftsmen. I love the little sketches in his letters, which seem like drawings of drawings. They are condensed versions of the big pictures he was painting at the time, so that Theo and the other people he was writing to could understand what he was doing. These days he’d be sending them on his iPhone. When you look at them, they contain everything. It’s all there. He certainly didn’t do anything by halves.”

David Hockney

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“Limitations are really good for you. They are a stimulant. If you were told to make a drawing of a tulip using five lines, or one using a hundred, you’d have to be more inventive with the five. After all, drawing in itself is always a limitation. It’s black and white, or line or not line, charcoal, pencil, pen. You might have a bit of color—but if you can use only three colors, you’ve got to make them look whatever color you want. What did Picasso say? ‘If you haven’t got any red, use blue.’ Make blue look like red.”

David Hockney

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“It was the first time I ever saw people actually flying around the streets, it was so windy. Cabbed to Union Square ($3) and that’s where I really saw people in the air. If you were on the sunny side of the street it was nice, beautiful, but then when you’d hit a corner you’d get blown away. People were holding on to things. Went to the office. Stephen Mueller and Ronnie were finishing stretching Shadow paintings for my show next week.”

Andy Warhol

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“I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel.”

Josef Albers

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“De Kooning can do ‘messy’ by making a charcoal stroke over paint and then smudging same with his talented thumb—in prose the same gesture tends to look like simple ineptitude. De Kooning has a whole vocabulary of bad behavior which enables him to set up the most fruitful kinds of contradictions. It frees him. I have trouble rendering breaking glass.”

Donald Barthelme

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“I’m still an old-fashioned painter. Maybe in a few years when I’m too old, I’ll need help, but what am I going to do, say to an assistant, put the yellow there?”

Ellsworth Kelly

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“If you look at Seurat, most of the dots in the grass are green, the generic color of that area. The other colors only modify that color. I feel less kinship to Seurat than I do to Byzantine mosaics, where an image is built out of discreet incremental marks—chunks of stone or glass—that fit together. I want people to see what made the image. I like dropping crumbs along the trail like Hansel and Gretel. That’s what all these paintings are about.”

Chuck Close

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“I remember a backdrop of a brick wall I painted for a play. I painted each red brick in by hand. Afterwards it occurred to me that I could have just painted the whole thing red and put in the white lines.”

Joe Brainard

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“I think of my work as what used to be called women’s work: knitting, quilting. Women were busy cooking, raising children, so they had to have an activity that they could pick up and put down. A quilt may take a year, but if you just keep doing it, you get a quilt. Or if you knit one and pearl two, and you believe in the process, eventually you’ll make a sweater. There’s some aspect of that in me.”

Chuck Close

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“It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”

Cy Twombly

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“At the right there was an old House—the window was open. We could see a table with a greenish oil cloth, on it a long bread, a bottle of wine, heavy white plates. We could only see the old hands of the people who were eating. A hand passed a basket with 2 peaches on it. It was all the paintings of the world, quiet, resisting time, everlasting. It is the only image of duration and eternity I have seen in a long time.”

Anaïs Nin

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“Rothko paints how the blind see.”

David Stephen Mitchell

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“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.”

Joan Didion

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