Cai Guo-Qiang Quotes

It lies around us like a cloud- A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

If I could bring 'The Tunnel' to life, I'd like to do it like that.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Reality of things is hidden in the realm of the unseen

The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

Drawing is the root of everything.

If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.

Art is a line around your thoughts.

God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination