Eva Hesse Quotes

The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

I'm not brave, I'm not fantastic. I'm like any other woman. I'm unhappy. I'm difficult. I'm sad. Am I strong, too? Maybe, but not always. There are days when I don't want to see anyone. The most important thing you learn? You can live with it.

I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard.

My story is just my story, and it's not nearly as traumatic as some.

Within my first year of moving abroad living on my own, my sister got ill - she got cancer - and at the same time, my mum got cancer, and she passed away. I think at that time it was a hard challenge for me to deal with it, but in a way, I have always taken strength out of anything that has come at me.

In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it

I am weary of personal worrying, in love with the art of madness.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

I love art because it doesn't have rules like baseball. The only rule is to be good. That's the toughest thing to do.

If it works out, it's the best thing in the world. If it doesn't work out, it's like having your heart torn out and chopped up into little pieces while you watch. It leaves a big hollow space that never really heals.

A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs.Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I've been pretty messed up, a mess pretty much.

One of the things I'm most proud of about myself is my ability to fail in front of the world. You have to have that attitude when you want to experiment in art, in music, in writing, or in fashion.

It was a very difficult time. I was working on [umble-Ardy] when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

Self-pity is an acid which eats holes in happiness.

All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I draw from creatively today.

I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.