Yayoi Kusama Quotations

I want to become more famous, even more famous.

The country of Britain is wonderful because of its royalty.

When I paint, some things come out, and I don't know. Maybe it's because I have such talent as a painter.

When I was a child, I used to paint intently. The older I become, and the closer death approaches, the brighter my life gets day by day.

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.

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.

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.

The reason I collaborate with Louis Vuitton is that Louis Vuitton is number one in the world, and I am honored to work with them.

Certainly, I devote my energy to both telling my personal life story and seeking self- obliteration. However, I will not destroy myself through art.

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

I would like to try harder to establish my thought and philosophy strongly and to go back to the universe with my love.

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

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

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.

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

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

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,

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.

I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.

If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,

The thought of continually eating something like macaroni, spat out by machinery, fills me with fear and revulsion, so I make macaroni sculptures. I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this 'obliteration.'

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 am just another dot in the world

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.

With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing philosophy of the universe through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition.

Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.

Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment. Take off your clothes. Forget yourself. Make love. Self-destruction is the only way to peace.

My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots.

A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can't stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement... Polka-dots are a way to infinity.