Top 25 Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.

A newspaper that you‘re not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn’t think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

I don’t mess around with my subconscious.

People ask me, ‘Don’t you ever run out of ideas?’ Well, on the first place, I don’t use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it’s too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven‘t run out of curiosity.

If you’re going to paint extremely, you need a big piece of canvas.

If you don’t have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.

I wouldn’t use the same color in a picture in more than one place.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

I’m sure we don’t read old paintings the way they were intended.

Every time I’ve moved, my work has changed radically.

Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand – I use those words interchangeably – another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it’s five, or thirty seconds and it’s just a different bed for activities there.

I don’t think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don’t want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

Pollock also… wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I’ve been here for four years and this is 1965.

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.