“. . . what I’m doing is equating my paintings with my poetry. In other words they are concrete. The LOVE is a concrete poem as far as I’m concerned. Just a one word poem. Repeated so endlessly by myself, and it’s a little bit like, shall we say, like Gertrude Stein. Just don’t stop using a word, you see . . . Remember there’s another aspect about love and of course this really comes through in [the poem] Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart. Love is a noun and a verb and so one must decide what my love is. It’s a command, love, and it’s a subject, love. It is an exercise, and grammar is one of my favorite subjects.”
— Robert Indiana
Excerpt from Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Ph. D. Interview with Robert Indiana. January 13, 1991. Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech Archive, 1987–2005.