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

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.

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.

I agreed to co-found the Stuckists to be allowed to say what I wanted, and I left the Stuckists because I didn’t really want to be in them in the first place.

I retire to make way for an abler man. In my four years as attorney general I have aged about ten years, but when I have get back to the practice of law, I hope to show those lawyers that I still have some vitality left.

So I sat there for a second, and then I said “did you know that if Babe Ruth had been the Messiah, the Catholics would have beer and hot dogs at Communion?” He left.

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can’t afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

If I hadn’t learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while, I’d never have left Flin Flon.

Once you’ve left the concept of family, you’ve left the concept of kingdom

At the moment, my mother is the only one left in Glasgow, although it’s certainly my home.

If somebody says, “You like putting out fires,” and I say, “It’s not a case of liking it, but I do put them out, and if there aren’t fires left I make them, so I can put them out.” It’s what we do.