myX and anotherX. You can set x and retrieve x directly from the AnIntegerNamedX class. You cannot do this with instance members, you can only invoke instance methods from an object and can only access instance variables from an object. You can access class variables and methods either from an instance of the class or from the class itself. you declare an instance variable. Every time you create an instance of a class, the runtime system creates one copy of each the class's instance variables for the instance. You can access an object's instance variables from an object as described in Using Objects.