A biography for Anish Kapoorhasn’t been written yet.
“All ideas grow out of other ideas.”
“I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.”
“One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.”
“I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.”
“Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.”
“I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.”
“One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.”
“I've nothing to say.”
“I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.”
“You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.”
“One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?”
“I, in the end, make art for myself.”
“Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.”
“A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.”
“Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.”
“We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.”
“I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.”
“What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world.”