Quotes by Jasper Johns

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.
Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.
Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.
Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.
I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.
Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.
I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.
I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.
I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.
I never wish for critics.
I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.
I tend to like things that already exist.
One works without thinking how to work.