Work is my joy.. .Work is my therapy, I dont know anybody who loves wo — 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."

"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."

"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."

"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."

"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."

"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."

"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."