Quotes By Anish Kapoor

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

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

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

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

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.

I, in the end, make art for myself.

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.

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

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

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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

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.

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

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

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.

All ideas grow out of other ideas.

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.

The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I feel there's everything to do yet.