Kooning Quotes

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. - Willem De Kooning

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns. - Willem De Kooning

Once, after finishing a picture, I thought I would stop for awhile, take a trip, do things -- the next time I thought of this, I found five years had gone by. - Willem De Kooning

My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate. - Willem De Kooning

If you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today. - Willem De Kooning

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in hte negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monk. - Igor Stravinsky

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art. - Willem De Kooning

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it. - Lee Krasner