Barbara Rose: In all your imagery, there is no death. … It’s interesting that in all your years of producing new directions in your art, you have never gotten into death imagery. Is that something you ever think about?

Robert Rauschenberg: Not often. I have always said that life has nothing to do with death. They’re two separate things, and that’s the way it ought to be. If that’s innocent, so be it. Innocence is not like virginity. Virginity you can only have once. Innocence you have to nourish every day.

Rauschenberg, interviewed (cited here)