Cai Guo-Qiang Quotes

We actors are superstitious creatures. We do all the homework, and we put all of the components together, but there's always one key aspect that we're not in charge of, really, and that's magic. You are always on the lookout for where and how that magic is going to ignite.

The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher's Stone.

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

Nearness to nature... keeps the spirit sensitive to impressions not commonly felt and in touch with the unseen powers.

Faith is spiritualized imagination.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

You can't share your magic with everyone. Your job is to live within your magic. And if other magical people find you, then let's go and make a brew.

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

For me, spiritual practice is a lot closer to art than science.

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

At the peak of his scientific triumphs, Newton became a 'head,' a student of the inner spiritual world - or in modern terms, a neurologician. Modern physicists do not dwell on this dramatic life-change in their hero.

The music comes from within and outside. Within is the big mystery of life; we've all got it.

Everything we do is art, philosophy, mysticism, cultural commentary.

The spiritual writing of the song is where you're chosen as a vehicle, and it comes from something up above. You don't move; it writes itself. It's very spooky, but that's happened to me just a few times.

People have talents that are different. Where does the creative flow come from - inside us or from a higher power? I don't ask any questions. I just write it down.

Wizarding is technical to me. When you get something that adds up to more than the sum of its parts, that feeling is magic to me. That's a kind of alchemy.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

Some people believe tarot cards are a form of black magic or senseless new age mysticism but for me they are a practical way of talking directly to the universe.

You have to talk to the stone, and it has to talk to you.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

I'm not a magician. I'am an alchemyst, a man of science, though perhaps not the science you would be familiar with.