Yayoi Kusama Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#2. I will keep painting until I die.

Yayoi Kusama

#3. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#4. I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama

#6. People ask about art and commercialism. I think that if someone tries to sell their work at a high price, that is the wrong way of doing it.

Yayoi Kusama

#7. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#8. I am putting every effort toward creating my works from morning till night on every single day.

Yayoi Kusama

#9. I hope royalty continues forever. This is the thing that can contribute to peace throughout the world.

Yayoi Kusama

#10. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama

#12. I love painting so much that nothing else matters.

Yayoi Kusama

#13. 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.'

Yayoi Kusama

#14. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#15. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama

#17. I was in the U.S. about 15 years. Especially in New York. And then I came back to Japan.

Yayoi Kusama

#18. I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.

Yayoi Kusama

#19. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama

#21. I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

Yayoi Kusama

#22. New York is the place that made my and other artists' dreams come true by giving us a chance to realise our ideas and concepts. It was a great place for making a presentation of artistic creation.

Yayoi Kusama

#23. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#24. My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama

#26. Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.

Yayoi Kusama

#27. I never have a plan of what I am going to draw.

Yayoi Kusama

#28. Polka dots are fabulous.

Yayoi Kusama

#29. I am just another dot in the world

Yayoi Kusama

#30. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#31. Since my childhood, I have always made works with polka dots. Earth, moon, sun and human beings all represent dots; a single particle among billions.

Yayoi Kusama

#32. I believe that eyes are very important motifs. That's something that can discern the peace and love.

Yayoi Kusama

#33. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

#34. If there's a cat, I obliterate it by putting polka dot stickers on it. I obliterate a horse by putting polka dot stickers on it. And I obliterated myself by putting the same polka dot stickers on myself.

Yayoi Kusama

#35. Georgia O'Keeffe proposed that I live with her. She was in New Mexico then, and I wanted to be in New York.

Yayoi Kusama

#36. 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.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama

#38. I want to become more famous, even more famous.

Yayoi Kusama

#39. Basically, my idea and explorations on fashion have not changed; however, I believe I'm going state-of-the-art on fashion.

Yayoi Kusama

#40. It doesn't matter at all for me that I work in hospital or anywhere with limited space. Every day, I'm creating new works with all my might.

Yayoi Kusama

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

Yayoi Kusama