"You don't paint the way someone, by observing his life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving. The question about knowing will naturally be wrong. When you've finished giving, the look surprises you as anyone else. Some painters talking about painting are like a lot of kids dancing at a prom. An hour later you are too shy to get out on the floor."

“The final test of painting, theirs, mine, any other, is; does the painter’s emotion comes across?.. ..Procedure is the keyword.. ..The difference is that we don't begin with a definite sense of procedure. It's free association from the start to the finished state. The old idea was to make use of your talent. This, we feel, is often to take the line of least resistance.. ..painters like Rothko, Pollock, Still, perhaps in reaction to the tendency to analyze which has dominated painting from Seurat to Albers, associate with very little analysis. A new form of expressionism inevitably followed. With De Kooning the procedure is continual change, and the immediacy of the change. With Jackson, it's the confidence you feel from the concentration of his energy in a given picture..”

“If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.”

“People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.”

“I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.”

“If you're a painter, you are not alone. There's no way to be alone. You think and you care and you're with all the people who care. You think you care and you’re with all the people who care, including the young people who don’t know they do yet. Tomlin in his late paintings knew this, Jackson always knew it: that if you meant it enough..”

“My old landscapes of Pennsylvania are worth so much now that I have to hide them, so I don't get put in an even higher tax bracket. For years nobody would pay a dime for them. They're still the same paintings. They didn't get any better. I treasure them as much as my recent black and white abstracts.. .My dealer was furious when I showed him my latest works. I'm returning to color. He tells me to ride it out and change when the fashion change. I told him no! I told him I paint each painting from the heart. I have followed my heart all my life.”