A biography for Robert Rauschenberghasn’t been written yet.
“Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.”
“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.”
“I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place.”
“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.”
“Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.”
“If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.”
“I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.”
“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.”
“And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“An empty canvas is full.”
“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.”
“I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.”
“Curiosity is the main energy...”