Anish Kapoor

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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.