Filling a space in a beautiful way -- that is what art means to me.

I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.

Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn't be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.

I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary -- you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding -- to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.

I always have a curious sort of feeling about some of my things -- I hate to show them -- I am perfectly inconsistent about it -- I am afraid people won't understand -- and I hope they won't -- and am afraid they will.

The simple fact of yourself... there it is... just you... no excitement about it... a very simple fact... the only thing you have... keep it as clear as you can.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me -- shapes and ideas so near to me -- so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn't a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.

Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint.

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.

One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.

I find that I have painted my life, things happening in my life -- without knowing. After painting the shell and shingle many times, I did a misty landscape of the mountain across the lake,
and the mountain became the shape of the shingle -- the mountain I saw out my window, the shingle on the table in my room. I did not notice that they were alike for a long time after they
were painted.

That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world -- bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars -- but it makes living great -- doesn't it -- I'm glad I want everything in the world -- good and bad -- bitter and sweet -- I want it all and a lot of it too.

I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.