Suzanne Collins Quotes

My father worked in a scientific lab where he designed and built glass instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills.

Students of American glass must always keep in mind that the creations they collect are truly examples of our American culture... and thus have historical significance.

Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.

The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling - a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.

Stained glass enabled the modern world.

Architecture was pretty much the sexiest thing to be doing from 1700-1800.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

Visual presentation of our heritage in glass is needed.

The building's identity resided in the ornament.

It's hard to shape glass. It took me years of practice, and as a result, I've never gotten bored with it. It's difficult. Every time I come into the studio, I've got some sort of new challenge. And something that I would like to learn how to do better, and the material never disappoints me.

I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs.

While I tend to keep embellishment minimal as my clients often possess some of the finest jewellery, I enjoy creating ornamentation that appears like installations, to compliment the overall look.

Do glassmakers not have the ability to knead their own agates, marbles and rock crystals?

I hate the idea of getting in a building that someone else has designed and having to do something to it yourself to sort of dress it up - it's like using presets in your tracks.

I have been interested in neon for a long time. The first neon I made was in 2006, using the word 'America.'

I went from fashion to glass in 1995, and I'm very interested in architecture.

Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."

Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.

If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?

I paint by all the daylight we have and that is little enough, less perhaps than you have by much... imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass.

When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.