Andy Goldsworthy Quotes - Page 3

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.

If you repeat something, it can become pointless. Some things can repeat and be endlessly fascinating.

If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.

Art is not a career - it's a life.

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

My work comes first, reasons for it follow.

The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break.

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

I'm not a performer, in that I don't like the public, but I work in that respect.

I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.

The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.

Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer.

One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.

I'm dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn't work, if this doesn't sustain me, I can't go back to nature. I'm right there. There's nowhere to go, and that frightens me.

The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone.

The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.

The main reason I went to digital was because I got time-lapse, video, and still images all in one camera. Having a minimal amount of gear is really important for someone who wants to walk around. That allowed me to have this flexibility to document things in different ways.

I love the winter. Well, I love all the seasons, but the winter is possibly one of the most intense.