I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions t… - Robert Rauschenberg

It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that.

I didn't even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didn't know it was a 'painting' until much later) was 'Hope' [of George Frederic Watts, 1886] the woman sitting on the globe with.. .that green [of the painting 'Hope'] you only get in reproductions]! I think that negates the idea of a painter's relation to official – old master art. It was neutral ground – that one picture – I responded to visual things.. .'Hope' was just sort of visual thing there, not art.

I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.