And finally after months of really a cold war [between his father and him] he made a very generous agreement with me that if I would get a Ph. D. so that I would be equipped to teach in a college as an economic insurance, he would give me fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life to do whatever I wanted to do on the assumption that with fifty dollars I could not starve but it would be no inducement to last. So with that agreed on Harvard then - it was actually the last year - Harvard still had the best philosophy school in the world. And since I had taken my degree at Stanford in philosophy, and since he didn't care what the Ph. D. was in, I went on to Harvard.

In 'Oral history interview with Robert Motherwell', 1971 Nov. 24 - 1974 May 1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution - after 1970