Robert Rauschenberg's Quotes

One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.

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.

The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.

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.

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.

An empty canvas is full.

I don't mess around with my subconscious.

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

I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.

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

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

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.

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.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

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

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

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

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

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

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

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.