Louise Nevelson Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.

Louise Nevelson
I think most artists create out of despair.... if labor pain is for physical birth, then there is a psychic pain and spiritual for creation.... The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Nevelson
I think all great innovations are built on rejections.

Louise Nevelson
The freer that women become, the freer will men be. Because when you enslave someone — you are enslaved.

Louise Nevelson
I never feel age.... If you have creative work, you don't have age or time.

Louise Nevelson
I knew that a day I took away from the work did not make me too happy.

Louise Nevelson
And I believe that the physical is the geography of the being.

Louise Nevelson
My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.

Louise Nevelson
And I saw darkness for weeks. It never dawned on me that I could come out of it, but you heal. Nature heals you, and you do come out of it. All of a sudden I saw a crack of light... then all of a sudden I saw another crack of light. Then I saw forms in the light. And I recognized that there was no darkness, that in darkness there'll always be light.

Louise Nevelson
My theory is that when we come on this earth, many of us are ready-made. Some of us — most of us — have genes that are ready for certain performances. Nature gives you these gifts. There's no denying that Caruso came with a voice, there's no denying that Beethoven came with music in his soul. Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib. You're born with it.

Louise Nevelson
I believe in my work and the joy of it. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you. It absorbs you totally and you absorb it totally. Everything must fall by the wayside by comparison.

Louise Nevelson
It gave me great pleasure to think that I could take wood, make it good, and make people like Rockefeller buy it with paper money.

Louise Nevelson
Who is an artist? I say we take a title. No one gives it to us. We make our lives.

Louise Nevelson
A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school.

Louise Nevelson
I never for one minute questioned what I had to do. I did not think for one minute that I didn't have what I had. If just didn't dawn on me. And so if you know what you have, then you know that there's nobody on earth that can affect you.

Louise Nevelson
You know when I decided to become professional - that means to expose yourself naked to the world with the other creative minds - I said, 'I'm going into areas I don't know. I might just fall right down to hell and kill myself.

Louise Nevelson
Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise.

Louise Nevelson
In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall. That's the only place where everything is all right.

Louise Nevelson
Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.

Louise Nevelson
I think that in the sexual act, as delightful as it can be, the very physical part of it is, yes, a hammering away. So it has a certain brutality.

Louise Nevelson
I think people should think a million times before they give birth. The guilts of motherhood were the worst guilts in the world for me. They were really insurmountable. You see, you are depriving another human being of so many things, and the other party also knows it.

Louise Nevelson
The essence of living is in doing, and in doing, I have made my world and it's a much better world than I ever saw outside.

Louise Nevelson
If you have got a living force and you're not using it, nature kicks you back. The blood boils just like you put it in a pot.

Louise Nevelson
In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it.

Louise Nevelson
It's a hell of a thing to be born, and if you're born you're at least entitled to your own self.

Louise Nevelson
In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line.... From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.

Louise Nevelson
[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.

Louise Nevelson
You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

Louise Nevelson
I'm in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I'm in the process of working.

Louise Nevelson
Some of us come on earth seeing. Some of us come on earth seeing color.

Louise Nevelson