Henry Moore

“Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.”

“I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'.”

“The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.”

“The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.”

“I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.”

“A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.”

“I was the seventh in the family. By the time I came along, one brother and two sisters had already become teachers, and this was the sort of path carved out for the rest of the family.”

“In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor.”

“Everything I do is intended to be big.”

“So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.”

“I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.”

“Since the Gothic, European sculpture has become overgrown with moss, weeds - all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.”

“It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.”

“Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn't like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.”

“There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.”

“Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.”

“The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.”

“To know one thing, you must know the opposite.”

“The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.”

“I believe that nothing should be taboo - no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to a discovery.”