Kiki Quotes

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.

I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.

It's fun, in a way, to explore what's risky in one's life.

I think that sense of always traveling has something to do with anonymity and privacy and pleasure in having a very clear, very reductive life.

Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life.

Stained glass enabled the modern world.

If you stick to your work it will take care of you somehow.

If anything needs love it is reality, for it is reality that lacks it the most - I doubt that it was ever loved.

I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.

All that we are and all that we've ever felt, words have felt it first.

You are walking in a desert.You hear a bird singing.As absurd as it may seem for a bird to be pending in the desert,you are obligated to make it a tree.That's poem

As an artist, you want to have an experience. What you need to experience changes over the course of your life because your life changes.

Love grows by not giving to us. And if our passion for poetry lives on and persists, it is because poetry offers us only its bits of lint.

I've grown extremely tired of the face of the world.

Life is much larger than how we image it, always, but society can be constricting in ways.

I always say I'm Catholic - but a cultural Catholic. I wouldn't say I'm a spiritual person, although I pray every day.

Life's essential length is only a few pages long, as succinct as a line of verse and as brief as the title of a poem.

I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.

The hardest thing is remembering that you have some complicity in the things that happen to you in your life.

My older brother had a lot of Elvis on vinyl, and really, that was my first introduction to music during the Fifties.

I enjoy incorporating different elements of music that I enjoy listening into my songs. I want to give what feels good to me while never compromising my message, which is Jesus is my Lord and Savior.

I don't necessarily "deal" with the criticism of others. I used to, but now I'm so confident in my walk with Christ that it simply no longer impacts me. I can't allow it to. I'm on a mission!

Sometimes your personal life is much more significant. Sometimes your work life is more significant. Friends and family, or sometimes the general population, take precedence.

Life changes a lot. I guarantee you.

Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.

In our family, there wasn't anything else besides art. Nothing else in the world existed. My father never spoke about going to a movie or listening to music, other than my mother's singing.

My iPhone has changed my life - I spend hours taking photos of the sidewalk as I walk down the street. I like the casualness, that it's low-resolution.

It's just disgusting that in this society, the majority of students in art school are women, but they amount to less than 30% of what is shown in museums. That has not changed radically.

What I try to do is to keep emotion on a tight leash; otherwise, it can never be transubstantiated into poetry.

Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

I don't aspire, but I would be very happy if one of my poems suddenly offered someone a shady rest stop, a breather in our interminable march under the murderous, scorching heat of the superfluous.

When I was young, it was an exciting time to be in New York.

Poetry relishes ripe fruit - but ripe is one thing and overripe quite another. That's something poetry doesn't like, so it couldn't care less if I were to fall overripe to the ground.

I have to keep healthy; otherwise, I jeopardise my career.

I had a cancer scare in the early 90s, and for a few months, I wondered if I would make it.

My work life makes much less sense now than 20 years ago. It's Humpty-Dumpty-like in a way; I can't put the pieces back together.

I first had no interest in figuration whatsoever.

Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change.

My support system is simple - people and time. The miracle of other people in your life.

I've been very lucky being in New York. While there are many things that have impacted my life, I have been able to stay here and do my own work.