Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them.

Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving.

I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance.

People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

My wife is one of the best wimin on this Continent, altho' she isn't always gentle as a lamb with mint sauce.

There's something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that 'Everlong' is on it, or 'Best of You' is on it, and it's really special.

Later on, towards the end of their lives, I thanked her. I said, "Mom, you were really tough." She said, "I wasn't tough! I always believed in you."

Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence

It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift.

I never get myself in a situation where I don't have creative freedom.

If you don't expect to like someone and then you do, that's an incredibly exciting moment.