You begin with the possibilities of the material. – Robert Rauschenberg
So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design. – Robert Rauschenberg
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain. – Robert Rauschenberg
I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this. – Robert Rauschenberg
Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world. – Arthur Helps, “Chapter IV,” Companions of My Solitude, 1851