Top 70 Quotes & Sayings by Anish Kapoor

I've nothing to say.

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

Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.

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

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

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

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.

My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.

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.

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.

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.

I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.

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.

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

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.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

I, in the end, make art for myself.

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

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.

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

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

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

There's something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

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

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

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

One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.

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.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

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.

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.

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

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.

I feel there's everything to do yet.

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

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.

All ideas grow out of other ideas.

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

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.

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

I am really interested in the idea that art can reach wider, can go further, can go beyond the art world, why not? People are intelligent, people are visually intelligent, and why shouldn't the work be able to engage some of that?

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

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

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

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

All ideas grow out of other ideas

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade

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

If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak.

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

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

The whole point of being an artist is to have no agenda. To say, you know, I don't know what I am going to do tomorrow, I don't know what it's going to look like, and I'm going to have a go at it.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist

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

It's the role of the artist to pursue content

I'm not necessarily interested in being the best Indian artist. I want to be the best artist I can be. That's enough of a declaration of intent.

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.