Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.

It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

The wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way.

If you forge a Carl Andre, it's just another Carl Andre. It's not like a Vermeer.

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

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen. When you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.