Jasper Johns

One works without thinking how to work.

Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant.

One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

I tend to like things that already exist.

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.

Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.

I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.

What you might consider a bad work can be of extreme interest to an artist in ways which are not about its being a good or bad.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.