Anish Kapoor Quotes

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

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

I've nothing to say.

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

I feel there's everything to do yet.

Re-investing in one's own little moments of insight is very important.

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

If one is talking about sculpture then scale and skin is everything,

What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world.

I, in the end, make art for myself.

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.

One does afford oneself the luxury to come into the studio and all day, every day, spend one's life making aesthetic propositions. What an immense luxury.

The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately.

The most important things that one's working on are not necessarily the most important things that one thinks one's working on.

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

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

One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.

I am Indian, and I'm proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.

It is important that artists are not outside the equation, we don't stand on the sidelines. Artists are part of the story of a response, we cannot stand aside and let others make the response.

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.

It's the role of the artist to pursue content.

It's precisely in those moments when I don't know what to do, boredom drives one to try a host of possibilities to either get somewhere or not get anywhere.

We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.

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.

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.

I don't want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, with bodily things ... One wants to open the story, not close it.

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 must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.

Red is a colour I've felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it's one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level.

My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.

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