Top 30 Yayoi Kusama Quotes

I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

I hope royalty continues forever. This is the thing that can contribute to peace throughout the world.

I have done all the work myself, not assistants. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair: I’ve been doing it physically – it’s hard labour – throughout my life.

Georgia O’Keeffe proposed that I live with her. She was in New Mexico then, and I wanted to be in New York.

My mother was against me being an artist. She just wanted me to marry a rich man.

I believe that eyes are very important motifs. That’s something that can discern the peace and love.

I am putting every effort toward creating my works from morning till night on every single day.

I love painting so much that nothing else matters.

I was in the U.S. about 15 years. Especially in New York. And then I came back to Japan.

I never have a plan of what I am going to draw.

Polka dots can’t stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environments.

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.

Suppose I put polka dots all over my body and then cover my background completely with polka dots. The polka dots on my body, merging with those in the background, create an optically strange scene.

I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.

I think I will be able to, in the end, rise above the clouds and climb the stairs to Heaven, and I will look down on my beautiful life.

Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions.

If there’s a cat, I obliterate it by putting polka dot stickers on it. I obliterate a horse by putting polka dot stickers on it. And I obliterated myself by putting the same polka dot stickers on myself.

In my home country, there was a little shop with old books, but it was really in the countryside. You couldn’t find English books. I found this very avant-garde American art book that had information about Georgia O’Keeffe. I was very much impressed by her.

Polka dots are fabulous.

Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.

It doesn’t matter at all for me that I work in hospital or anywhere with limited space. Every day, I’m creating new works with all my might.

I will keep painting until I die.

I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child. Only after that, it seems, have they been used throughout the rest of the art world.

I want to become more famous, even more famous.

I have a flood of ideas in my mind. I just follow my vision.

I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

You should create a work that is so valuable it might eventually sell at a high price, but you’ve got to concentrate on how you create that artwork.

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

More and more, I think about the role of the arts, and as an artist, I think that it’s important that I share the love and peace.

The country of Britain is wonderful because of its royalty.