“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.”

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.

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.

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.

My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

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.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.

At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

Reserve the language of sculpture for the art of sculpture. Lest you confuse beauty with the shape of a jaw or art with the size of a stomach.