Efesos, Turkey - 20071. “Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?”
2. "A woman once rang me up and said, 'Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print -Reptiles- you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.' I replied, 'Madam, if that's the way you see it, so be it.'"
3. “He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”
4. "I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity."
5. "I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days"
6. "I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough."
7. "I play a tiresome game"
8. "I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity."
9. “My work is a game, a very serious game.”
10. “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.”
11. "So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to
pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen"
12. "The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems...I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occured to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why."
13. "The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure"
14. "To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!"
15. "We adore chaos because we love to produce order."
