Louise Bourgeois Quotes

The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.

When I was growing up, all the women in my house were using needles.

I've always had a fascination with the needle, the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair damage. It's a claim to forgiveness. It is never aggressive, it's not a pin.

In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea.

My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.

I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.

I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.

I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn't get mad. She weaves and repairs it.

Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother.

It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.

I am a searcher... I always was... and I still am... searching for the missing piece.

Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep.

Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.

It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.

Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.

My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things.

I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.

Don't get the green disease of envy. Don't be fooled by success and money. Don't let anything come between you and your work.

I do not need the musing of the philosophers to tell me what I am doing.

It would be more interesting to let me know why I am doing it.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.

My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting.

The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

If you flatter me, or if you look at me the right way, I will kill myself to please you. It's very painful to be an overachiever.

Everywhere in the modern world there is neglect, the need to be recognized, which is not satisfied. Art is a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.

Sometimes it is necessary to make a confrontation-and I like that.

Art is a guarantee of sanity.

The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.

I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.

If you are resentful, you keep the thing alive. So the way to go on is to get rid of it, in order to forgive in order to forget.

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.

Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.

My life has been regulated by insomnia.

At the dinner table when I was very little, I would hear people bickering... To escape the bickering, I started modelling the soft bread with my fingers. With the dough of the French bread %u2013 sometimes it was still warm %u2013 I would make little figures. And I would line them up on the table and this was really my first sculpture.

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

Everyone should have the right to marry. To make a commitment to love someone forever is a beautiful thing.

The spider is an animal who eats mosquitoes. That's why I love the spider - it is the only way we have to deal with these insects.

I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.

Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.

I was raised a Catholic. But I am not religious. In my work, I am interested in real flesh and blood.

I dont watch TV. I dont use a computer, a fax or a cellphone.

I was a runaway girl from France who married an American and moved to New York City. Im not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.

I am a lonely runner, but I am a long-distance runner.

To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.

The subject of pain is the business I am in - to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.

Clothing is . . . an exercise in memory. It makes me explore the past: how did I feel when I wore that. They are like signposts in the search for the past.

I work like a bee and feel that I accomplish little.

To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if Im inspired by the results.

It is not a torment to be an artist. It is a privilege.

I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.

The colour blue - that is my colour - and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into - not a world of fantasy, it’s not a world of fantasy - but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue.

My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed. They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing.