The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

New York is dead. It's too expensive.

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.