#om

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. ↗

— Jasper Johns

#certain #certain kinds #differences #different #different kind

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change. ↗

— Jasper Johns

#artist #before #being #change #during

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. ↗

— Jasper Johns

#i #i see #impure #neither #other

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else. ↗

— Jasper Johns

#artists #else #had #i #i can

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it. ↗

— Jasper Johns

#artist #become #being #bring #condition

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished. ↗

— Jasper Johns

#drawing #later #making #means #most

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy. ↗

— Michael Johns

#american #appropriately #central #crisis #decency

It's true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren't going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#any #become #change #different #everyone

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#ate #bark #bombarded #day #elite

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. ↗

— Lyndon B. Johnson

#failure #guns #human #rockets #symbols