Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it's my role as an artist to bring to expression, it's not my role to be expressive.

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

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

Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it's inside out, red.

The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.

All ideas grow out of other ideas

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.

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.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer

That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.

The Might God, Eternal Father.

I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

Electric cars aren't pollution-free they have to get their energy from somewhere.

If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs - don't pay any attention to its politicians.

He was consious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares, long, long, forgotten.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

Praise and disgrace cause fear.

A clear stream, a long horizon, a forest wilderness and open sky - these are man's most ancient possessions. In a modern society, they are his most priceless.

There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.