You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at.

The artist enriches the soul of humanity. The artist delights people with a thousand different shades of feeling.

Mere exactitude, of which photography and moulage [life casting] are the lowest forms, does not inspire feelings.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.

I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.

One mustn't let technique be the consciously important thing. It should be at the service of expressing the form.

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough.

The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.

To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.

I think if you have the compulsion to write, you're not going to feel whole until you start putting words on paper.

It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

If I love in thee, beloved, only what thou lovest most, do not be angry; for so one spirit is enamoured of another.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

I like the idea of taking three-dimensional objects and making them two-dimensional so that they look like cartoons.

Paint is the skin of a painting: it is fiction. In houses, it disguises the plumbing and wiring and studs and nails.

The fact that you were born means that there are no other children born because of you – you’ve killed them in a way.

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

I can’t understand it when people say they don’t like a particular color. . . . How on earth can you not like a color?

I'm an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There's no one name that fits me very well.

It doesn't matter what I use. It can be anything. What's interesting is how what I'm doing meets with the stuff I use.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already

Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering . . . I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures.

If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

The making of a whole person and the creation of true individuals can only happen by singing and dancing and making art.

The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.

In art, everything is particular. The more particular and the more intimate you get, the more you can give in the piece.

I have a confidence in my understanding of formal aesthetics and I don't want to be aware of it or make that my problem.

I honor every woman who has strength enough to step out of the beaten path when she feels that her walk lies in another.

My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.

I was in analysis and I told my analyst I wanted to be the best sculptor in the world and he said, 'Richard, calm down.'

Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.

The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition.

To know each other is the best way to understand each other. To understand each other is the only way to love each other.

Do not be concerned that you might set a target too high and fail. Be concerned that you will set it too low and succeed.

You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is my nightmare.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

A piece of sculpture can have a hole through it and not be weakened if the hole is of a studied size, shape, and direction.

If we have been pleased with life, we should not be displeased with death, since it comes from the hand of the same master.

The science about life is very optimistic. Every second, four people in the world die, and six are born. This is optimistic.

An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.

Beauty depends on purpose. It is in the elements best suited to their purpose or aim that beauty shines forth most strongly.

Because I had the children, I chose to have my studio in my home. I wanted them to understand my work and learn how to work.

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