Each day is a different length of time and that gives a different length to the cusp between light and darkness or darkness and light.

I apprehend light - I make events that shape or contain light.

You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.

This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.

I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.

We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.

We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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 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.'

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.

I haven't been that great at attending my own openings. Still, I'm learning to enjoy this a lot more than I used to.

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

If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.

I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.

I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.

The people in L.A. do orient themselves to light. I used to call it 'Tan Fascist Culture.' Everyone there is tanned, wears dark sunglasses, looks like a movie star even when they're not.

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

It's difficult for people to visualize from my drawings what it's going to be, so I often find myself talking them into things that they go along with, and when they see what's been made, they are surprised.

I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.

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

I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.

I'm interested in light. It's a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.

There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.

There are different stages when you fly. The first stage is the dollhouse effect, seeing everything on Earth like it's a model. Suddenly, all of your concerns seem very small.

I was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.

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.