Jasper Johns Quotes

It's always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers.

I look at my contemporaries, and we're all at different stages and levels, and all choosing different routes, different ways to do things.

My writing was liberated once I abandoned acting.

I feel like I introduce another level of my creative ability on every album.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I don't think anybody is anybody else's moral compass. Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life. Or maybe it is.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.

I guess I can go anywhere I want. If only I knew where to go.

I could be making a lot more money now if I had chosen a different kind of movie, but none of that matters to me... I've done the parts I wanted to do.

At the beginning, everything's possible and everybody gets equal time, all the characters, all the ideas. You don't know who's going to be the main characters; they're all fighting it out. It's like kind of the best time in a way.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

I always say don't make plans, make options.

I never quite know if what I do will be understood.

It's fun as a creator to make something that allows multiple interpretations.

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.

You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do - or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box, and then you escape from it. You build another one, and you escape from it. That's ongoing.

People would say to me, 'Who do you want to be as an artist?' And I would just look at them because I didn't know.