32 Quotes by Vik Muniz

The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.

I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

Who wouldn't like to give up normal life? I mean, normal life, you know, is the second worst thing to death itself. I think normality is something that makes everything very static, and I try to make my days, my daily routines, as uneven and rich as possible.

Gramacho is the last landfill that allows people in. Brazil is the leading nation in recycling due to its poverty. There are people there surviving from what they find in the garbage.

Garbage is the part of your history you don't want your family to know about.

I'm at this point in my career where I'm trying to step away from the realm of fine arts, because I think it's a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be. What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day.

I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much.

I think most people have creative ideas and have very strange, unorthodox impulses of things that they can do with their lives. I've had many of these over the years, but I decided the more important question was, 'When did I start calling this art?'