Cry down materialism all you will, surely one of the thoroughly satisfactory sensations of this world is to feel financially independent.

My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going

I don't want it all to be pretty - it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about.

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.

What's interesting about art in public spaces is that the public really sort of takes over and uses it in ways that you didn't anticipate.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.

I am in no mood to be deceived any longer by the crafty devil and false character whose greatest pleasure is to take advantage of everyone.

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

The spaces I want to be in are nurturing and soft and saturated with color. Our cities don't have enough of that, and as humans we need it.

In a park, you are not working with studio materials or a flat piece of paper. You have grass and the people and the city and the daylight.

All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And theres only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.

The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.

I am not a propagandist; my work has often had a political dimension but, hopefully, one that is not didactic and is open to interpretation.

I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is an essence, a soul.. In my inner soul art and life are inseparable

I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.

Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come.

All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.

At first when I realized I was a romantic, I was sort of shocked and shamed. But it is true... that the material I work most with is emotion.

It's good for art to make us think, to give us a shared experience that creates a dialogue, makes us talk to each other, including strangers.

I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands.

A wife, a lover, can perhaps never see what the artist sees. They rarely ever do. Perhaps a really mediocre artist has more chance of success.

The goods of Fortune, even such as they really are, still need taste to enjoy them. It is the enjoying no the possessing, that makes us happy.

I'm not so interested in the expression of something, but I'm more interested in what the material can do. And so that's why I keep exploring.

How painful it is to find that my figure can be of no help to my future... how painful to see it rejected on account of a slanderous suspicion!

If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control.

I don't want to feel like an ambulance chaser, but very often, when I hear about a fire, my first instinct is to make a piece of art out of it.

When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'You always want to be different.' I couldn't work out what she meant. I was just trying to be myself.

No, I have not a drop of what they call white blood in my veins. My father was a full blooded Negro, and my mother was a full blooded Chippewa.

There are infinite modes of expression in the world of art, and to insist that only by one road can the artist attain his ends is to limit him.

I'm not necessarily interested in being the best Indian artist. I want to be the best artist I can be. That's enough of a declaration of intent.

The very first lead work that I made is called 'Land Sea and Air,' and is the enclosure of primal elements within that kind of carapace of lead.

The photo replaces the memory. When someone dies, after a while you can't visualize them anymore, you only remember them through their pictures.

The work of art expresses precisely those things which do not die. It must do so, however, in a form that bears witness to the artist's own era.

I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.

Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They've got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

The way of a creative mind is always positive, it always asserts; it does not know the doubts which are so characteristic of the scientific mind.

To think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself be led into a cul-de-sac and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence.

If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I believe my love.

I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.

I had two great art teachers at school, but even they tried to tell me it was too hard a world. But that made being an artist even more attractive.

The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.

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