Vik Muniz Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“Creativity is how we cope with creation. While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable, or even pointless, creativity is always meaningful.”

“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.”

“I took the longest showers of my life after every time I visited Gramacho. It affects the personality of the catadores. They always dress really well, they're very sharp, and when they go out they always wear a lot of perfume because they're very conscious of the possibility of having the smell.”

“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.”

“The first five minutes in Gramacho is really overwhelming because all of your senses are being attacked. Visually, too, because your eyes move and see fragments of things you recognize, but not quite, so it's very artistic. Your eyes are moving, then there's the smell, and the noise is unbearable.”

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