Theaster Gates Quotes

I worked three summers putting in sewer pipe and guardrail on the road in Ohio.

I've framed houses, worked on an asphalt crew, I was a cop, a lifeguard.

As a little boy, my first job was delivering newspapers, and then I had a variety of different jobs. I worked in a butcher shop. I worked in a supermarket. I worked in construction. I dug ditches on the Long Island Expressway in 1954, 1955, 1956.

When I was in Chicago, I was working as a carpenter while I was doing plays. I thought it'd be a fun set construction job, but it turned up to just be a straight-up factory.

In my early 20s I was so miserable doing construction, I wanted something that paid money. I liked nice stuff. I liked cars and architecture, and things that cost money. I wanted to not swing a hammer, and make money... and not do stuff that was dirty. I attempted to get into comedy. I started to do stand-up, but I wasn't very good at it.

I used to be a hot-tar roofer. Yeah, I remember that... day.

I was one who liked to work with my hands as well as my brain.

For about a year, I just didn't know what to do. I did laboring jobs, working in the docks, construction sites.

Out of all my friends, I believe I'm the only kid whose dad made us work to cut rebars; we laid bricks in construction sites and did other real work every summer for minimum wage. Our dad said that it's important in the future that when we tell people to dig a hole, that you personally know how long it will take to dig that hole.

I worked construction clean-up. I was driving a pickup truck at the age of 14 on a construction site. I loved building and being part of the process. You got to see your work.

I was in the cement end of the construction business, as a laborer. I was pouring concrete, and stripping forms off of set concrete, and pulling nails, and stacking plywood, and doing that kind of thing. I was in peak condition in those days.

As a young girl, I plowed the fields of our family farm. I worked construction with my dad. To save for college, I worked the morning biscuit line at Hardees.

Everything I've done goes back to pro wrestling. Had I not been able to achieve what I did, I guarantee you... my high school jobs were always working in the highway department - driving dump trucks, patching up roads, digging ditches, driving a forklift.

I was 18 and had taken A-levels in Woking where I grew up. But I didn't want to go to university so left sixth-form college. My father was in the building industry and he found me a job stripping concrete panels off buildings. It was dangerous work on high scaffolds, sometimes 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and often weekends too.

I pour concrete. I'm a construction guy.

I did a lot of heavy-lifting - construction, demolition, that kind of thing. Dusty, dirty work.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

The travels before and after the tour are what add up to what you're doing. You are really called into service - and it's the service industry man, it's blue collar man, I'm sweating by the second song. It's construction work from that second song on.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

To be an artist is first to be a manual laborer.

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

We don't consider manual work as a curse, or a bitter necessity, not even as a means of making a living. We consider it as a high human function, as the basis of human life, the most dignified thing in the life of the human being, and which ought to be free, creative. Men ought to be proud of it.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?