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

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.

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.

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

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.

It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

I don’t know what will become of this piece. Our brave critics will no doubt charge me with imitating Ravel’s Bolero. Too bad – this is how I hear war.

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

Man is an imitative creature.