Quotes from James Turrell

I used to think that only people who were crazy were attracted to the desert, but once you've lived there, you become that way anyway.

I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.

Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

Art does, to some extent, follow economics.

There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.

It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.

There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.

The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.

One of the tenets in Quaker meditation is that you 'go inside to greet the light.' I am interested in this light that's inside greeting the light that's outside.

My aunt was Frances Hodges, who in the Fifties was the editor of 'Seventeen' and later one of the creators of 'Mademoiselle.' She was my Auntie Mame; she loved culture. She was a Quaker, but she became a milliner against all Quaker logic - they feel that fashion and art are vanities - because she loved fashion.

You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.

The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there is no taste. There's anarchy of taste, which seems good to me.

It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.

I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I'd prepare the walls - by sanding, etcetera - the way you'd prepare a canvas for painting.

We have spent billions to go to the moon - we go to this lesser satellite called the moon and say we are in space, but we are in space right now; we just don't feel ourselves to be in space. Some forms of art and some forms of spirituality do give us that sense.

My mother did not have a toaster oven and would toast bread in the oven, which I thought was stupid. They didn't do cars and electricity, that kind of stuff.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.

When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'

I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.

In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.

I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.