Georgia O'Keeffe

I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

You are one of my nicest thoughts.

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.

I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.

It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

To make your unknown known - that's the important thing.

I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I'd rather be doing something I wanted to do. I'd walk it again.

It is really so nice here-country-busy-busy with so many different kinds of things-... I must say I feel far away in another world here-... always we go to a new place...the people have a kind of gentleness that isn't usual on the mainland.

When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.