My fascination with numbers came out of a peculiar circumstance and that is that my mother couldn’t stand to live in one house for more than one year at a time. By the time I was seventeen years old I had lived in twenty-one different houses. So it got to be a kind of thing that this was house number 6 and this was house number 13. I was very concerned about it as a child and got even more interested in it later. And I think that’s where the fascination began. But, as you know, I’ve done a number of paintings that are not primarily concerned with words; although the word does appear the number is really the subject.
— Robert Indiana
Excerpt from Donald B. Goodall, Interviews with Robert Indiana, 1976–77.