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Quotes by Sculptor

"They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things."

"In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it."

"I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand."

"Architecture is inhabited sculpture."

"Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things."

"Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them."

"You know what black hatred women feel toward me as soon as they see me, until I return inside my shell, they use every possible weapon. As soon as a generous man tries to help me out, a woman is here to hold his arm and prevent him from acting."

"The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind and spirit he or she possesses."

"I have had the problem of seeing my male model go to Italy and... stay there."

"I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself."

"I took all my wax studies and threw them in the fire... that's the way it is when something unpleasant happens to me. I take my hammer and I squash a figure."
Fire,

"My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six."

"To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect."

"What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant."

"To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen."
Hope,

"I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded."

"Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave."

"When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left."

"A woman may not hit a ball stronger than a man, but it is different. I prize that difference."

"But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be."

"I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!"

"I think this, I think basically I'm not interested in people following my work or making work like my work."

"I thank you for your kind invitation to introduce me to the president of the Republic. Since I have not been out of my atelier for two months, I have no appropriate costume for this circumstance. Please excuse me."

"I would have preferred to be successful here with a piece that cost me a huge amount of money and effort... rather than sending to Bohemia some ordinary works."

"Now when you have administrators deciding what sexuality is, and what's a taboo and what's not in terms of content, you got guys, like, Trent Lott who equates homosexuality with a disease."

"I don't want to say anything because I know I am unable to protect you from the harm that I see."
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