James Turrell Quotes

At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.

I was 19 years old, pumping gas and going nowhere. I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.

I haven't shaken my fists at the moon.

What has changed is that nothing has changed... that's what has made me more unhappy than everything else.

I wanted to cry because it took me so many years

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

Expectation is the mother of all frustration.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

I don't want to dream anymore, I want my life to be real!

Here we are 17 years later. Those agencies never did come through.

Life doesn't always end up with a bow wrapped around it.

A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.

I really wanted to get out of England.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.

After hundreds of auditions and nothing, you're sitting home and wondering, 'What am I doing?'

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

I do not want to stay in Washington.

I don't think any of us grew up into the world we were hoping for or expecting.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

It is bitter to think of one's best years disappearing in this unpolished country.

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.