You live till you die, and that’s the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive.
When I got my first loft, I still didn’t know what I was going to paint… There were long stretches when I just sat there and thought without interruption.
There was one reviewer from the ‘New York Times,’ I forget his name, who said I was ‘death warmed over.’ I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The ‘Times’ fired him, put him in the cooking department!
The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn’t work together. I didn’t meet Andy Warhol until 1964.
The automobile crash was… devastating in ways that I still cannot really bear to think about… It took me many years to recover. In some ways, I never have.
Scientists say, ‘There is no such thing as time; gravity is a dust from another universe, and outside our own universe are many, many universes in all directions.’ They speculate that attached to these universes are probably 6,000 planets identical to Earth. So are there things living out there? Animals, people, anything?
Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they’re just not there to talk to. I can’t call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.
It’s amazing how you meet people through other people. I knew a racecar driver, Stefan Johansson, who was very hot. He introduced me to Jean Todt. He introduced me to a French doctor. He introduced me to a French architect who redid the Louvre with I.M. Pei. He introduced me to Daniel Boulud.
I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.
I was on a panel with Marshall McLuhan in Canada. Someone says, ‘Mr. McLuhan, I read your book, and I disagree with you.’ And he says, ‘Oh, you read my book? Then you only know half the story.’
I painted the Astor-Victoria sign seven times, and it’s 395 feet wide and 58 feet high. I dropped a gallon of purple paint on Seventh Avenue and 47th Street from 15 stories up and didn’t kill anybody. I dropped a brush at Columbus Circle. It fell on a guy’s camel-hair coat.
I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.
I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a ‘nether-nether-land’: things that were a little out of style but hadn’t reached the point of nostalgia.
Certainly I have made comments on American society with the various pictures and have done about nine antiwar paintings. But I did them because I was incorporating my feelings into my work.