Quotes from Antony Gormley

'6 Times' is an attempt to reinvestigate the social responsibility of sculpture. The body in question is a particular body, but it doesn't really matter whose it is.

I would say that the whole way that I have approached the body is as a space, not a thing - not an object to be improved, idealised or whatever, but simply to be dwelt in.

Public money should be spent on art but through individuals not committees.

It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.

I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.

I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

I think it's probably the Dutch who are to blame for starting the whole 'art business', because before they came along, art was attached to relatively stable structures, and it was everybody's. It was like going to the movies.

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive.

My best travelling experience lasted several years: between 1971 and 1974 when I bummed around the East. All I had with me was a cooking pot, a stove, a map and blankets and a couple of dhotis.

Due to the failure of politics, which has become a process of middle-management, art has become one of the last open spaces to question core beliefs and to design a viable future. Art becomes an open space where we can ask fundamental questions about ourselves.

I just want my work to be part of the elemental world.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

Art is not about understanding, it's about experience.

We are not moving towards some kind of goal. We are at the goal, and it is changing with us. If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact.