Quotes from Robert Rauschenberg

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

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.

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

I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.

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.

I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.

Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

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

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.

I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

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.

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.

I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary.

I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.

I was much happier when I had less responsibility... when my only responsibility was to my work and to myself.

Art is a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.

My art is about paying attention - about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

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

With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.