This was my first encounter with art as art [when he saw Pinky [Sarah — Robert Rauschenberg

"It is completely irrelevant that I am making them. Today is their creator."

"Josef Alberss [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh)."

"Its almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that Im most interested in. Nearly everything that Ive done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that."

"Albers [on Black Mountain College ] was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He wasnt easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, Im still learning what he taught me, because what he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didnt teach you how to do art. The focus was always on your personal sense of looking.. .I consider Albers the most important teacher Ive ever had, and Im sure that he considers me one of his poorest students."

"I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world."

"I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I dont find theater that different from painting, and its not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes."

"In the life of the mass-order, the culture of the generality tends to conform to the demands of the average human being. Spirituality decays through being diffused among the masses when knowledge is impoverished in every possible way by rationalisation until it becomes accessible to the crude understanding of all."

"I say this to you because we Spaniards are a forgetful people, because we are used to living for the moment, because we do not look back, because we do not know how to see the chain of heroes, because we do not contemplate the sum of sacrifices."

"Sharon Tate was my best friend. Once, we were roommates. She introduced me to my husband. She was the godmother to my baby daughter who is named for her. In the six years time that I knew her, she never said an unkind word about anyone."

"Long time to see. (VS: Tapion)"

"Most mathematicians prove what they can, von Neumann proves what he wants." Once in a discussion about the rapid growth of mathematics in modern times, von Neumann was heard to remark that whereas thirty years ago a mathematician could grasp all of mathematics, that is impossible today. Someone asked him: "What percentage of all mathematics might a person aspire to understand today?" Von Neumann went into one of his five-second thinking trances, and said: "About 28 percent."

"Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their childrens minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are."