Quotes from Jasper Johns

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.

A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.

All familiar things can open into strange worlds.

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

I never wish for critics.

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

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

I tend to like things that already exist.

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.

I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

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.

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.

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

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

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

Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.

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 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.

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

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.

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 think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.