Quotes from Takashi Murakami

As a young artist in New York, I thought about postwar Japan - the consumer culture and the loose, deboned feeling prevalent in the character and animation culture. Mixing all those up in order to portray Japanese culture and society was my work.

I tried to teach myself to draw anime, but I was so bad.

In Japan, I focus mostly on sending messages through Twitter, trying to spread my minority way of thinking.

We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don't completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.

When I was little, I guess I was just an ordinary kid. But then things changed when I was in junior high. You know, kids that become geeks become one because of something. Like, they aren't good at sports, or girls don't like them. I, too, for some reason, got into things like science fiction and, well, especially science fiction as an escape.

I don't think it's an unnatural thing at all for my collaborations or projects to be seen as art but entertainment at the same time.

If I have a certain opinion, I try to incorporate that into my work.

My aesthetic sense was formed at a young age by what surrounded me: the narrow residential spaces of Japan and the mental escapes from those spaces that took the forms of manga and anime.

I always have stress.

Like many other kids, I liked watching anime.

I've been immersed in manga since I was a kid. I grew up with this culture. So I started to think about how to compare manga to contemporary art.

My Miyoshi studio in Japan is located in the northern part of Saitama, which puts it in quite close proximity to Fukushima. As such, we can feel the effects of radiation.