Jeff Koons quotes:

I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show.

I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.

If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.

I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.

I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.

Art was something I could do better. It gave me a sense of self.

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.

When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.

I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.

For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.

I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.

Art helped give me confidence.

I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.

I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.

I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.

Pretty mundane closet, but a lot of ties. And I tend not to throw anything out, so I have a lot of clothes from all times from my life. I can be a little sentimental with things like that.

The entertainment industry, the advertising industry have taken [the] tools from the art world and made themselves much more politically potent. We are really devastated and very impotent right now. A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

I think artists are always investigating how to have an economic, political platform. At one time, artists were supported by the Church. Then they were supported also by the state.

From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.

I think about my work every minute of the day.

Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I believe in sensuality. I believe in sex. I believe in the survival of the species. I like aspects of things that are ethereal, but I like the reality of nature and embracing the way nature works, and aspects of interrelationships between male-female, aspects of the body, the way the body has changed over thousands of years . . .

I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.

Ive always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. Thats what Ive always done.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, its perfect. You dont have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. Thats where its found. Its found within you.

The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.

Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.

Anything you can do to protect the public and allow it to have the confidence that our financial controls are good is very, very positive.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.

The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.

Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.

Nothing can touch me now - I'm Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !

I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.

I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.

The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.

The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.

I try to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.

Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.

Even before I had children I wanted the intensity of my life to get greater. I wanted to feel things more strongly. I wanted my intellectual parameters to expand. But it comes back to your own desire to be engaged and to live up to your parameters.

When I view the world, I don't think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.

My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves.

My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.

I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.

As an artist, I've always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.

I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.

I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.

I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.

I'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.

The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.

A photograph for me does not have a sense of spiritual seduction, it does not have an essence, that this is something that permeates and which is eternal through time.

I want my work to be accessible to people,

I learned a lot about the images of pornography and how much they dealt with close-up, when a person is at their most vulnerable and having to reveal details about themselves. I wanted to combine the eternal in two different manners. There is the biological eternal - here is our species reproducing - and then the transparent, spiritual aspect of it.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

My favorite activity is to be with my family.

I'm interested in power.

If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.

As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

It's about the production of the work. I need my workers to stay focused.

I would prefer a normal-sized breast, or a small breast or whatever, and that it be natural, than to understand that it was just some jelly in there.

I'm interested in power. I'm interested in the kind of polarities and equilibriums that take place within sexuality and philosophy and sociology. So in Versailles, in this type of setting, you have a place that is about absolute control, where everything has been thought about.

It's wonderful to make a lot of money, to be able to take care of my family, to have the facilities I have and really support the people the studio's involved with. But at the end of the day I'm quite simple as an artist-it's really about the power of art.

People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.

I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.

I don't think irony is about judgment; I think irony is something like, "Oh, that's interesting," because it's not something I think one starts off to achieve. I think it's just something that presents itself. And if it does, I find it's usually optimistic, not negative in its terms.

I don't like being naïve about the market, and I always try to make things as great as I can. Then I hope that there's an audience that enjoys them, and that hopefully those things get protected.