James Turrell Quotes

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

The inner eye does not see upon command.

Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.

Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Well, I'll say I have an incredible ability to fantasize - I really do. I don't have to have things tangible to be able to see them, and therefore I enjoy so many things, because they're in my mind.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

The images from the book you make in your head are always going to be the best images.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

Shut your eyes and see.

Man lives by imagination.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

All my work comes from perceiving. I kept seeing things that were brooding in me. I'm not a geometric artist.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

Everything I've written I see in a very precise way and I hear in my inner ear.

The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

Everyone reads the same words in a book but has a very clear picture of their own.

I heard that your subconscious is on the right side. I always shut my right eye when I play, or both eyes. I feel like you go to a deeper place in your subconscious, and you tell the stories that are more deeply within you.

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

You have to be open to dreaming. It's a complicated language, but I'm obsessed with it.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.