1. “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
2. “I will keep painting until I die.” – Yayoi Kusama
3. “Creating art and writing novels and poems are simply different roads I have chosen in my search for truth.” – Yayoi Kusama
4. “I am just another dot in the world” – Yayoi Kusama
5. “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
6. “All of my works are steps on my journey, a struggle for truth that I have waged with pen, canvas, and materials. Overhead is a distant, radiant star, and the more I stretch to reach it, the further it recedes. But by the power of my spirit and my single-hearted pursuit of the path, I have clawed my way through the labyrinthine confusion of the world of people in an unstinting effort to approach even one step closer to the realm of the soul.” – Yayoi Kusama
7. “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
8. “I have a large number of enthusiastic admirers of my art. And they all sing a hymn in praise from the bottom of their hearts for my art.” – Yayoi Kusama
9. “It is my wish to leave a message to the whole world from the universe, a message of love and peace to the people of the world.” – Yayoi Kusama
10. “I want to become more famous, even more famous.” – Yayoi Kusama
11. “A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm.” – Yayoi Kusama
12. “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.” – Yayoi Kusama
13. “I read the art reviews of my work. Some critics understand my art correctly, while some don’t. I simply ignore the reviews written by the latter.” – Yayoi Kusama
14. “I hope royalty continues forever. This is the thing that can contribute to peace throughout the world.” – Yayoi Kusama
15. “With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved.” – Yayoi Kusama
16. “My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected to my disease. I create pieces even when I don’t see hallucinations, though.” – Yayoi Kusama
17. “I never have a plan of what I am going to draw.” – Yayoi Kusama
18. “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
19. “Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.” – Yayoi Kusama
20. “I have a flood of ideas in my mind. I just follow my vision.” – Yayoi Kusama
21. “I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.” – Yayoi Kusama
22. “I have been struggling with mental illness and emptiness throughout my life. Now I want people to understand my glorious quest for the truth. Working on paintings is a process toward my artistic creation. It is a new spiritual theme of my whole philosophy for pursuing the truth. Each painting represents a process in all of my art.” – Yayoi Kusama
23. “There were times in the past that I got angry at some members of the press whose writings greatly disrupted my serious pursuit of art and my behavior as an artist.” – Yayoi Kusama
24. “You know, I must really work hard. I’m in the last stage of my artistic life. But I’m so busy that I can’t even think of dying. I fly all over the world, drive everywhere, and when I get home, I find interviewers and photographers and TV shows waiting for me. No wonder I’m so busy.” – Yayoi Kusama
25. “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
26. “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
27. “I love painting so much that nothing else matters.” – Yayoi Kusama
28. “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art.” – Yayoi Kusama
29. “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
30. “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
31. “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
32. “My life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots.” – Yayoi Kusama
33. “I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.” – Yayoi Kusama
34. “Every time I have had a problem, I have confronted it with the ax of art.” – Yayoi Kusama
35. “I would like to dedicate to the whole world a great message. It is a message from Kusama who has struggled to survive as a human being and as an artist, and whose life has been brightly lit and strengthened by her pursuit of truth.” – Yayoi Kusama
36. “Now our Earth is swarmed with issues such as life, death, illness, wars, economic crises and many others. It is time that we sing out loud the message, ‘Love forever.’” – Yayoi Kusama
37. “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
38. “I believe that eyes are very important motifs. That’s something that can discern the peace and love.” – Yayoi Kusama
39. “Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can’t explain why if you ask me.” – Yayoi Kusama