Sol LeWitt Quotes

I have a private press. I'm a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.

I have to go make books. Sorry about that.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

No matter how well a person writes, a successful book is a team effort involving many, many people.

Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing.

I've never envied the person who had to put my books together in one script.

Making books is hard work. Some books are, of course, more demanding than others.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

It's much more difficult to make an unbound book than a bound book, because the factories aren't set up to make an unbound book.

Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

Sometimes I'm in the studio, sometimes I'm not. It's about delivering the music to the artist, but it's also about the inspiration.

I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings.

The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.