Quotes from Jeff Koons

From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.

I try to educate people about materialism through my work. I try to show them real visual luxury.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

I think artists are always investigating how to have an economic, political platform. At one time, artists were supported by the Church. Then they were supported also by the state.

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

Anything you can do to protect the public and allow it to have the confidence that our financial controls are good is very, very positive.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

I don't like being naïve about the market, and I always try to make things as great as I can. Then I hope that there's an audience that enjoys them, and that hopefully those things get protected.

Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.

I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.

I would think that to people like my father, and the people of his generation, Popeye is like a male priapist. So if you think in ancient terms, he would have a harem, a symbol of male energy.

I think about my work every minute of the day.

I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.

I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.

When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.

I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.

Feelings are at the basis of all ideas. First you have feelings, and then, through those sensations, it develops into ideas.

I think art teaches us how to feel, what our parameters can be, what sensations can be like; it makes you more engaged with life.

I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.