James Turrell Quotes

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.

Night is the mother of thoughts.

Know, thou, that the lines that live are turned out of a furrowed brow.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Our souls need time to think, dream, and reflect.

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

Although even when I am being idle I have plenty of food for thought both early and late - thoughts both about and not about art.

Pondering, which means to weigh mentally, to deliberate, to meditate, can achieve the opening of the spiritual eyes of one's understanding.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

To believe a thing is to see the cool crystal water sparkling in the cup. But to meditate on it is to drink of it. Reading gathers the clusters; contemplation squeezes forth their generous juice.

They only babble who practise not reflection.

You should live in a manner that should enable you to devote time to writing and contemplation. As is often said, the writer is at work even when he is simply looking out the window.

This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.

My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

I'm very much an observer and a conduit of thoughts and ideas.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

Every now and then, I have a deep thought.

There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

Imagination decides everything.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.