107 Quotes by Jasper Johns

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.

I wish there were more humor in my work than I see in it.

What you might consider a bad work can be of extreme interest to an artist in ways which are not about its being a good or bad.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.