Anish Kapoor

“Public sculpture is a public statement. It's not a private statement. It's not a whisper in your ear.”

“The void is not silent.”

“That's what artists do, that's what poets do—they confound the normal order of things, to show us the world in a different way.”

“It is the artist's job to be a witness to his time in history.”

“Red has a certain kind of darkness. It is a colour that is of the earth and it is a colour that is of the body.”

“The viewer is an essential part of the work. Without the viewer, there is no work.”

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

“One doesn't make art, one is driven to make art.”

“Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.”

“If you make something, it's an object. If you make something that has a resonance, it's art.”

“I am not a painter, I am not a sculptor, I am a space-shaper.”

“The work is not what I have made but what it does.”

“I've always been drawn to the idea of a thing that is not what it appears to be.”

“The skin is a boundary. It's a very thin boundary.”

“To be an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.”