This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head - he thinks of it, whatsoever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complete form..

I am the thinking person's sculptor, joining metal manipulation to meaningful expression.

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

A sculptor can be thought of as the sort of person who can reduce impressions of things, responses, and ideas about things into sculptural forms.

I was not good at painting so I thought I should try sculpture, as I liked putting my hand in my work. It is totally natural for me to make the work myself.

Fortunately, a sculptor's style and aim are, to a great extent, dictated to him by his materials. To make a sculpture seem at all moving or inspiring, an artist must, of course, be gifted with a certain personality that speaks movingly through the subject and materials of his work. But he must select appropriate materials, and use them appropriately, too.. .My materials often dictate my change of aims, and I choose to work in a different material much as a man may suddenly feel an appetite for a change in diet. [c. 1960]

Sculpture is all about hard work and delayed gratification, and mysterious, harmonious, pleasantly jarring, revelatory spatial structures—having good times and bad times at the same time.

The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. ... .I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way. Carving is more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience and clay to the visual attitude. An idea for carving must be clearly formed before starting and sustained during the long process of working; also, there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature.

You can't make a sculpture, in my opinion, without involving your body. You move and you feel and you breathe and you touch. The spectator is the same. His body is involved too. If it's a sculpture he has to first of all sense gravity. He's got two feet. Then he must walk and move and use his eyes and this is a great involvement. Then if a form goes in like that – what are those holes for? One is physically involved and this is sculpture. It's not architecture. It's rhythm and dance and everything. It's do with swimming and movement and air and sea and all our well-being. Sculpture is involved in the body living in the spirit or the spirit living in the body, whichever way you like to put it.

The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion — life. ... Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes.

Light and space ... are the sculptor's materials as much as wood or stone ... I feel that I can relate my work more easily, in the open air, to the climate and the landscape.

To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

It is in a sculptor's interest that there should exist a close relationship between his art and that of the poet. Otherwise, his sculpture may lack human or emotional content and become too strictly architectural. We sculptors pay a heavy price for the limited freedom that we enjoy as a result of our being able to create in three dimensions; we must sacrifice color and whole realms of subject matter, such as landscape, that scarcely lend themselves to a representation in three dimensions. [c. 1960, in France]