Explore Quotes by James Turrell

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act-there's a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.

I want people to treasure light.

Las Vegas is about distraction.

It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.

In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.

I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.

I used to think that only people who were crazy were attracted to the desert, but once you've lived there, you become that way anyway.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.

I've always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There's not any hierarchy of taste, and that's what L.A. always was to me: It's not really a town of culture - it's a town of entertainment.

I don't think my work is about the spiritual life, but it certainly touches on it.

I would describe Los Angeles as actually not having taste. In New York, there's taste. But you have to remember that taste is censorship. It's a form of restriction.

In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.

The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.

If you just add all the time, add more and more light, it loses its meaning.

I am interested in the physicality of light itself.

There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.