I spent three years there and encountered great teachers who gave me enough stimulation to last me for the rest of my life - Josef Albers, painter; Buckminster Fuller, inventor; Max Dehn, the mathematician, and many others. Through them, I came to understand the total commitment required if one must be an artist.

I think you have to teach kids to work, and you can only teach them to work if you work... I can't delegate jobs if I'm not doing it.

With art, your motor sense should be developed at full capacity.

I'm not so interested in the expression of something, but I'm more interested in what the material can do. And so that's why I keep exploring.

It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

I no longer identify myself as Japanese or American but a 'citizen of the universe.'

All my wire sculptures come from the same loop. And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape.

I used to unwind the wire tags that labeled the crates of vegetables and took the fine brass and steel wires and braided and twisted them together to make bracelets, rings, and figures.

If I hadn't spent all those years staying home with my kids and experimenting with materials that children could use, I would never have done the Ghirardelli and Hyatt fountains.

We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.