Quotes from Yayoi Kusama

My mother was against me being an artist. She just wanted me to marry a rich man.

I love painting so much that nothing else matters.

Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama's hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.

The country of Britain is wonderful because of its royalty.

Suppose I put polka dots all over my body and then cover my background completely with polka dots. The polka dots on my body, merging with those in the background, create an optically strange scene.

Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots we become part of the unity of our environments.

Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment. Take off your clothes. Forget yourself. Make love. Self-destruction is the only way to peace.

It is my wish to leave a message to the whole world from the universe, a message of love and peace to the people of the world.

More and more I think about the role of the arts, and as an artist, I think that it's important that I share the love and peace.

I believe that eyes are very important motifs. Thats something that can discern the peace and love.

I never have a plan of what I am going to draw.

I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials. Overhead is a distant, radiant star, and the more I stretch to reach it, the further it recedes. But by the power of my spirit and my single-hearted pursuit of the path, I have clawed my way through the labyrinthine confusion of the world of people in an unstinting effort to approach even one step closer to the realm of the soul.

Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots we become part of the unity of our environments.

The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.

I work as much as fifty to sixty hours at a stretch," Kusama wrote in a 1961 article of her entrancing, utterly consuming creative process. "I gradually feel myself under the spell of the accumulation and repetition in my nets which expand beyond myself, and over the limited space of canvas, covering the floor, desks and everywhere.

Creating art and writing novels and poems are simply different roads I have chosen in my search for truth.

O Time: hold still awhile. I have so much more work to do. There are so many things I want to express. But time just keeps ticking away, and the earth never for an instant ceases to turn.

My revolution of the Self, which has been such an essential part of my life so far, is all about discovering death. My destiny is to make art for my own requiem: art which gives meaning to death, tracing the beauty of colours and space in the silence of death's footsteps and the 'nothingness' it promises.

Psychological and physical frictions abound in the rifts between human beings and the enigmatic, civilised jungle they inhabit. I am deeply interested in trying to understand the relationships between people, society, and nature; and my work is forged from accumulations of these frictions.

Action Painting was all the rage then, and everybody was adopting this style and selling the stuff at outrageous prices. My paintings were the polar opposite in terms of intention, but I believed that producing the unique art that came from within myself was the most important thing I could do to build my life as an artist.

I couldn't escape this militarism because the government wanted it and the schools wanted it. I suffered. It killed my mind" - Yayoi Kusama

But because New York was the sort of place it was, there were also many artists with true backbone – robust people who could not be broken. And these artists were doing good work.

With this first letter I sent fourteen watercolors, including Nostalgia of the Orient, Glorious Sunset at Sea, Distressed Stars on Earth, Deep Sorrow, Kingdom of Ferns, Abandoned Heart, and Rye and Rainbow.