James Turrell

My aunt was Frances Hodges, who in the Fifties was the editor of 'Seventeen' and later one of the creators of 'Mademoiselle.' She was my Auntie Mame; she loved culture. She was a Quaker, but she became a milliner against all Quaker logic - they feel that fashion and art are vanities - because she loved fashion.

It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.

New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.

I used to think that only people who were crazy were attracted to the desert, but once you've lived there, you become that way anyway.

I was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.

I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.

There are different stages when you fly. The first stage is the dollhouse effect, seeing everything on Earth like it's a model. Suddenly, all of your concerns seem very small.

There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.

I apprehend light - I make events that shape or contain light.

I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.

I'm interested in light. It's a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.

I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.

It's difficult for people to visualize from my drawings what it's going to be, so I often find myself talking them into things that they go along with, and when they see what's been made, they are surprised.

Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.

The people in L.A. do orient themselves to light. I used to call it 'Tan Fascist Culture.' Everyone there is tanned, wears dark sunglasses, looks like a movie star even when they're not.

I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.

I've always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There's not any hierarchy of taste, and that's what L.A. always was to me: It's not really a town of culture - it's a town of entertainment.

I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.

I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.

If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.

I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin - and I mean, we are literally light-eaters - to then affect the way that we see.

I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.

The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.

I want people to treasure light.

We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.

Las Vegas is about distraction.

It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.

In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.

My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.

From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.

There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.

If you just add all the time, add more and more light, it loses its meaning.

Art does, to some extent, follow economics.

I don't think my work is about the spiritual life, but it certainly touches on it.

It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.

I am interested in the physicality of light itself.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I'd prepare the walls - by sanding, etcetera - the way you'd prepare a canvas for painting.

In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.

I don't want you looking at the light fixture; I want you looking at where light goes. But more than that, I'm interested in the effect of light upon you and your perceptions.

There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.

I've always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

To some degree, to control light, I have to have a way to form it, so I use form almost like the stretcher bar of a canvas.

There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.