“All my work begins with drawings.”

“Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.”

“I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.”

“I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.”

“I don't labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.”

“I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define.”

“I have a sort of inner sense for scale.”

“I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that - maybe that's possible.”

“I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.”

“I like to be able to get swift curves in the plant drawings that are usually drawn in five to ten minutes.”

“I only like artists older than myself. Time is so important. It's always been the same way, I guess.”

“I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.”

“I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.”

“I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.”

“In Boston, I developed my eye from the drawing. In Paris, I was fascinated by what my eye saw in the way that Paris is built, its 'measure.'”

“I've always wanted... I wanted to give people joy.”

“My drawings have to be quick. If they don't happen in 20 minutes or a half hour, then they're no good.”

“My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.”

“My forms are geometric, but they don't interact in a geometric sense. They're just forms that exist everywhere, even if you don't see them.”

“My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual.”

“My ideas I can find anywhere. And I draw because I have to note down my ideas or flashes - I call them flashes, because they come to me, like that. Not so much in the plant drawings. I have to see them.”

“One of the first drawings I did in Paris - I wasn't thinking of doing drawings, but somehow or other, I kept drawing - I bought a hyacinth flower with a lot of leaves, just to make me feel like spring.”

“Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.”

“The negative is just as important as the positive.”

“The paintings to me are always canvas; sculpture has always been metal, though I have made sculpture in wood, also.”

“When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.”