Destructive Creation Quotes

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

When I'm making a collage, there are a lot of things about it that are violent.

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.

I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it.

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.

I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.

My process is pretty messy, and there's a lot of creative destruction in it. When I set out to write something, I'll write some passages from it just to figure out who these characters are, how they talk. And I have a dim sense of what it's about and where it's going to go, but I know that's going to change, too.