..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ].

I'll make me a world.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

I was very young at that time, and always I used to tell myself that if ever I could do it, I would try to create a little world — Oh! quite a small one, but still — a small world where people would be able to live without having to be preoccupied by problems of food and lodging and clothing and the imperious necessities of life, to see if all the energies freed by this certainty of an assured material living would spontaneously be turned towards the divine life and inner realization.

Short quote of Newman about his first 'Zip' paintings, c. 1946-1948

I dreamed of a friendly machine to which you could delegate all those manual tasks which are prone to errors. A machine that could quietly learn and perform tasks, that could store simple data and instructions, that could be used by anyone, that would be inexpensive and the size of other office products which people used. I had to create a new language which did not need interpreters in white coats.

I am a little world made cunningly.

Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.

Sylvester: When was it that you first did a painting with one or two simple lines, horizontal or vertical, across the surface?
Newman: I would say that it began in '46— '47. In those years, whenever I did a painting with one or two elements in it, it did always have a sense of an atmospheric background, I suppose — with the exception of a painting which I called Euclidian Abyss, where the background is black and has some of the white coming through, but there's no true atmosphere.

I have sought a unified world in my work and use a movable vortex to achieve it.

Words create worlds.

Give me matter and i will build a world out of it.

Being able to collectively dream those new worlds means that we can begin to create those new worlds here.