James Turrell Quotes

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.

My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

Space has a way of looking. It seems like it has a presence of vision. When you come into it, it is there, it’s been waiting for you.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

I've always felt that night doesn't fall. Night rises. There are these incidences in flying where you just sit there. It's one of the best seats in the house.

I like when you feel like you arrive in a very different place, with a different ordering of the reality you normally think of.

We create the reality in which we live.

I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.

I’m interested that light has thingness itself, so it’s not something that reveals something about other things you’re looking at, but it becomes a revelation in itself.

I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.

We eat light, drink it in through our skins

I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

I’ve always felt that night doesn’t fall. Night rises.

To have a certain new eight-and-a-hal f-minute-old light from the sun-to feel it physically, almost as we taste things-this is where you can work with light like that.

It was important that people come to value light as we value gold, silver, paintings, objects.

When you’re O.C.D., you want the most beautiful animals.

In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.

You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.