Quotes from Michael Craig-Martin

I am personally happy for artists to make as much money as they can while they can to carry them through the times when they can't.

My great grandmother was Chinese .

As an artist you are free to use any image, any style, any idea from any culture and any period of history.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.

'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.

In Britain the power of authority was weakened. There was much more individual freedom and there was great academic freedom.

I greatly admired him as a teacher I didn't teach the same way as Josef Albers at all.

In a sense [Joseph] Albers was an authoritarian teacher. He had rules about most things and very definite ideas.

When I started teaching in the late 60s, in a time of student revolutions and changes, they changed in question of society and authority.

If you were really interested in being creative in teaching, it was possible to try new methods and that was really what we did in Goldsmiths - we used the freedom of the time.

If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.

When I go to China I see many artists whose work reflects on aspects of contemporary popular culture but obviously the history of Western art is not part of their own tradition.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.

Art is more to do with observation than invention.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

Sometimes we look at a work of art and we immediately think that it is German art, but with some we don't, it's not so obvious.

In my early work I didn't use much colour. I had no confidence about how I could do this.

I've taken away everything I could think of, and yet what remains is enough. These days many more people come to my work, and once they see my work they will always recognize it.