• I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

    Jasper Johns: I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
    Jasper Johns, Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, England) (1974). “Jasper Johns: drawings”