“My left hand is my thinking hand (image), my right hand my doing hand (sequence).”

I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep.

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

The naturalness of life… the sense of community is, I think, a very important factor in an artist’s life.

It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.

I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.

My works are an imitation of my own past and present.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension – the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

The United Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails it is our failure.

I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you’re professional or you’re not.

Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize… …It is essentially practical and passionate.

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again… Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

[My works are] an imitation of my own past and present and of my own creative vitality as I experience them in one particular instant of my emotional and imaginative life. . .

At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn’t enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It’s not competitive with men. It’s a complementary contribution.

I am a Muslim Arab, in my actions oriented very to the left, in my convictions.

Maybe that’s why I was left out of a lot of things, or why my work was not really understood, because there was no precedent for it.

And I probably would’ve been better off if I’d left myself alone.

And who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childhood goes with her.

What part of Canada are you from, honey?” “THE LEFT PART,” said Jay.

Then the small amount of forces that we would have left there might have slowed this day, but they wouldn’t have prevented it altogether.

You don’t really develop feelings about a place till you’ve left it. It’s like a girl or a dog.

I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.