I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.

There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.

The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.

I know that science is very interested in answers, and I'm just happy with a good question.

If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist.

The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there is no taste. There's anarchy of taste, which seems good to me.

When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

There's traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that's the last thing on an artist's mind.

I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.

Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on.

I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer.

We have spent billions to go to the moon - we go to this lesser satellite called the moon and say we are in space, but we are in space right now; we just don't feel ourselves to be in space. Some forms of art and some forms of spirituality do give us that sense.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

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.

There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.

I come from L.A. where there's a sense of show. But that's not a bad word in my mind. We say art 'show,' don't we? 'Show' implies entertainment.

I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin - and I mean, we are literally light-eaters - to then affect the way that we see.

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.

The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.

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 come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.

My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.