Jeff Koons

“Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.”

“Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.”

“Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.”

“I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.”

“Once you trust in yourself, you automatically want to go outside of yourself.”

“I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.”

“I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.”

“I try to make pieces that are durable. One of the reasons that I work in steel is durability.”

“Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.”

“I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.”

“I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.”

“There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!”

“I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.”

“I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.”

“I think art teaches us how to feel, what our parameters can be, what sensations can be like; it makes you more engaged with life.”

“Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.”

“I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.”

“I think about my work every minute of the day.”

“I'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.”

“I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.”