All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

I'm very grateful that I was too poor to get to art school until I was 21. . . I was old enough when I got there to know how to get something out of it.