It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.

If you're any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people.

Those who show no loyalty give up the right to expect any.

Every one can master a grief but he that has it.

A heaven on earth.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials -- they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think -- rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.

Dignity does not come from avenging insults, especially from violence that can never be justified. It comes from taking responsibility and advancing our common humanity.

If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.

When you see the body outside of a costume and see the strength that it takes, people would look at dance a different way and see how athletic it is. You're not just born like that.

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.