I realized the wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not — Carl Andre

"He [Carl Andre] does not mind that Minimalism is no longer the avantgarde, he accepts as inevitable that his art, which enjoyed a brief moment of glory in the 1960s and 1970s, will for some decades be regarded as passé."

"Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stellas painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting."

"I like the description Physical art. I think maybe art emerged when man first began to distinguish himself from nature. Art is part of himself, which he returns perhaps as an homage to the nature which he left. Of course, he never left nature. The rise of consciousness, perhaps.. .The main thing we believe, that separated us from not only animals but from the stones, is the fact that we are not stones, that we are not dogs. Now that is an assumption, perhaps its a false assumption. But anyway, somehow I think one of the greatest functions of art is that man can feed back to his own consciousness through the knowledge that he is not a stone or not a dog. [December 1969; quote from a talk with his audience]"

"As I have said many times, for me an artist is a person who says hes an artist, and an artwork is what an artist says is an artwork. Although for myself, I am not interested in ideas as the burden of art.. ..the important thing about art is how it stimulates us. I think the more you are stimulated by more different kinds of art, the more demanding youre going to become on the level of your stimulation. The key to art is experience of it and proximity to it."

"You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world thats not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen.. ..when you desire a work of art and make it, youve added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things."

"My work is atheistic, materialistic and communistic. Its atheistic because its without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual quality. Materialistic because its made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials. And communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men."