Jeff Koons

When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.

My favorite activity is to be with my family.

I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.

I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

I think artists are always investigating how to have an economic, political platform. At one time, artists were supported by the Church. Then they were supported also by the state.

Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.

If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.

I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.

Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.

A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.

I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.

A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.

I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.

Pretty mundane closet, but a lot of ties. And I tend not to throw anything out, so I have a lot of clothes from all times from my life. I can be a little sentimental with things like that.

Feelings are at the basis of all ideas. First you have feelings, and then, through those sensations, it develops into ideas.

Once you trust in yourself, you automatically want to go outside of yourself.

I try to make pieces that are durable. One of the reasons that I work in steel is durability.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

I would think that to people like my father, and the people of his generation, Popeye is like a male priapist. So if you think in ancient terms, he would have a harem, a symbol of male energy.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

It's not about finding relevance or perfection or imperfection in objects, but it's that you can accept yourself and then go out and accept others.

I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.

I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.

Art helped give me confidence.

I think art teaches us how to feel, what our parameters can be, what sensations can be like; it makes you more engaged with life.

As an artist, I've always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.

I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.

Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.

From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.

I try to educate people about materialism through my work. I try to show them real visual luxury.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.

One of the reasons I work with technology the way I do is that I can really be assured that the vision I have from the outset is what will be at the end. And that that vision isn't altered through the process.

Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.