Quotes from Robert Rauschenberg

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

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

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.

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

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

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

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

It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.

I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.

Curiosity is the main energy.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

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.

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.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

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.

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.

I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee'.. ..I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

For me there is no difference between art and life.

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.

Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.

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.