Frank Stella's Quotes

Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings.

Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real.

I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you.

I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

What you see is what you see.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.