My work is a game, a very serious game.
It is human nature to want to exchange ideas, and I believe that, at bottom, every artist wants no more than to tell the world what he has to say.
Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general.
Originality is merely an illusion.
Drawing is deception.
I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints.
The things I want to express are so beautiful and pure.
I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven’t the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I’ve been doing this work for thirty years now.
At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.
There is something breathtaking about the basic laws of crystals. They are in no sense a discovery of the human mind; they just “are” – they exist quite independently of us. The most that man can do is become aware, in a moment of clarity, that they are there, and take cognizance of them.
I might be in the basement. I’ll go upstairs and check.
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.’
I might be in the basement. I’ll go upstairs and check. We adore chaos because we love to produce order. I don’t use drugs; my dreams are frightening enough.
To have peace with this peculiar life; to accept what we do not understand; to wait calmly for what awaits us, you have to be wiser than I am.
I am a graphic artist heart and soul, though I find the term artist rather embarrassing.
I don’t grow up. In me is the small child of my early days.
I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me.
I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well.
Baarn, 5 July 1964: ‘On the train to Utrecht I was suddenly overwhelmed and enormously moved by a sky full of clouds at different levels. I experienced a sense of space and three-dimensionality such as I’d not experienced for a long time. It’s possible to suddenly become aware of these things, even in an overpopulated country like Holland. Provided that you are looking up, you’ll suddenly see that timeless and unbounded eternity. Do you think it silly, or can you imagine what I mean?
I want to find happiness in the tiniest of things – a minute moss plant, 2 cm across, on a rock – and I want to try to do what I’ve been wanting to do for so long, that is, to copy these infinitesimally small things as precisely as possible and to be aware of their size.
We do not know space. We do not see it, we do not hear it, we do not feel it. We are standing in the middle of it, we ourselves are part of it, but we know nothing about it.