- Jackson Pollock: If people would just look at the paintings, I don't think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It's like looking at a bed of flowers, you don't tear your hair out over what it means.
- interviewer: How do you know when you're finished with a painting?
- Jackson Pollock: How do you know when you're finished making love?
- Lee Krasner: [reciting] To whom shall I hire myself out? / What beast must I adore? / What holy image is attacked? / What hearts must I break? / What lie must I maintain? / And, what blood shed?
- Lee Krasner: [seeing his breakthrough painting] You've done it, Pollock. You've cracked it wide open.
- interviewer: How do you respond to some of your critics? They have said a mop of tangled hair, a child's contour map of the battle of Gettysburg, cathartic disintegration, degenerate. What do you say to that?
- Jackson Pollock: You forgot baked macaroni.
- Lee Krasner: You're not just randomly putting paint on the canvas, you're painting *something*. You can't abstract from nothing, you can only abstract from life, from nature.
- Jackson Pollock: I *am* nature.
- Tony Smith: What do you think of Picasso?
- Jackson Pollock: Yeah, he has been.
- Tony Smith: DeKooning?
- Jackson Pollock: He's alright, he's learning.
- Peggy Guggenheim: I have just climbed up and down five flights of stairs. I'm Peggy Guggenheim...
- Lee Krasner: We're sorry.
- Peggy Guggenheim: [to Pollock] My God and you're drunk.
- Jackson Pollock: No.
- Lee Krasner: No.
- Jackson Pollock: [referring to Lee] I'm dead without her.
- Ruth Kligman: But I'm the one who loves you, Jackson.
- News Broadcaster: Mr. Pollock, in your opinion, what is the meaning of modern art?
- Jackson Pollock: Modern art, to me, is nothing more than the expression of the contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.
- News Broadcaster: Do the classical artists have any means of expressing their age?
- Jackson Pollock: Yes, and they did it very well. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims. The thing that interests me is that today, painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. They work from a different source, they work from within. It seems to me that the artist cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture.
- Lee Krasner: Jackson Pollock, I'm Lee Krasner. I thought I knew all the outstanding artists in New York and I don't know Jackson Pollock.
- Clem Greenberg: What you're doing is the most original and vigorous art in the country.
- Jackson Pollock: We're broke!
- Clem Greenberg: Yeah, keep at it.
- Jackson Pollock: Keeping at it... don't tell me to keep at it!
- Peggy Guggenheim: [before love making] I think you don't realize how hard I worked to get people interested in your work.
- Sande Pollock: [quoting from William Blake] There is a smile of smiles in which these two smiles meet.
- [first lines]
- Jackson Pollock: [drunk] Who's the greatest drummer in the world?
- Sande Pollock: What?
- Jackson Pollock: Krupa