Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.
One day, I saw a statue of Benjamin Franklin, and I said to myself, 'I can do that kind of work, too.'
I don't believe in inspiration. I believe in work, because while one works one's creativity is opened.
Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.
The Force of Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and in its active contagiousness.
I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.
When everything goes right a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise!
We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.
The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.
I didn't make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
I believe that nothing should be taboo - no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to a discovery.
A good artist ought never to allow impatience to overcome his sense of the main end of art - perfection
Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.
It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.
Don't ask what it means or what it refers to. Don't ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.
I think different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work.
Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them
If you touch something you leave a charge on it, and anybody else touching it connects with you, in a way.
The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging.
Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80
I feel as if they are somewhere between movement and stillness, and thus in possession of a certain energy.
Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.
Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.
My features I take from my father, but my spirit, my industry and perseverance I get from my Indian mother.
The most powerful part of the art is experiential, yet it's the hardest to describe because it's nonverbal.
I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work.
I was educated by monks - I thank them dearly for the education they gave me, but I am no longer a Catholic.
My countrymen have commissioned a bust of the Republic. It will be placed on the fountain of my native town.
Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.
I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.
My sculpture thrives in the context of the city, interacting with people in the course of their daily lives.
There is no need to create. Genius comes only to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence.
I think that all human activity is stupid. Artistic activity is also stupid, but you can see it more clearly.
I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.
'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.
If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?
I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively.
Mushy novels, pretty pictures, pretty sculpture, decorations on the wall, nice parallel lines - make me sick.
I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.
Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.
But I'll try to immerse myself in as many of the formal characteristics of site as possible in the landscape.
A piece of art is never a finished work. It answers a question which has been asked, and asks a new question.
An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.
I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.
I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
Art is basically made by dissatisfied people who are willing to find some means to relieve the dissatisfaction.
That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.
A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.
Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.