The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

There is nothing deadlier than to be called a good teacher like Hofmann or Albers. It's like making boredom a central fact about art.

Intellectually and aesthetically the important thing was that there was absolutely no relation between the abstractionists and the surrealists.

I've been teaching for almost 20 years. I've never been called a good teacher, incidentally. I'm proud of that.

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.

In the early '40s I ran the gamut of commercial and industrial jobs around New York World's Fair that Russel Wright, Norman Bel Geddes, and so forth were in on.

The surrealists were even programmatically they were anti-art. They were involved in, I don't know, life or love or sex or I don't know what. They were living it up.

I've taken on all the bad terms of the '30s. Like meaningless, useless, imageless-those kinds of words. Words like inhuman, sterile, cold-they became cool.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.