James Turrell Quotes

Watching something is a personal experience, and I think watching something that is dealing with a heavy subject matter, it's a personal thing.

Like when I hear a beat, it might make you feel a way, but then it might make me feel a completely different way.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition.

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

You think you're looking at things all the time, but you're not looking at things, you're looking at what your brain is interpreting through light and color. And who knows what everybody else sees?

Each one of us interprets various stimuli according to our own personal sensibility.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It's simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

The satiated person and the hungry one do not see the same thing when they look upon a loaf of bread.

More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught.

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

We never really perceive what color is physically!

Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.

Light is my inspiration. My photographic images search for dimensions that words cannot touch- the result of intense responses to personal experiences. I do not wish to "record," but rather to touch upon the illusive meanings which I perceive and try to comprehend in this limitless universe.

Travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen.

What one person sees as degrading and disgusting and bad for women might make some women feel empowered and beautiful and strong.

The camera is as subjective as we are.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.