Talk:M. C. Escher

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• 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."

• By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analysing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

• Drawing is deception.

• I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

• 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 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.

• Only those who attempt the absurd... will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check.

• Originality is merely an illusion.

• Talent and all that are really for the most part just baloney. Any schoolboy with a little aptitude can perhaps draw better than I; but what he lacks in most cases is that tenacious desire to make it reality, that obstinate gnashing of teeth and saying, "Although I know it can't be done, I want to do it anyway".

• 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 occurred to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why.

• We adore chaos because we love to produce order.
  • Variant: We adore chaos because we like to restore order.

• What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.