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. Vik Muniz Read Quote
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. Vik Muniz Read Quote
Creativity is how we cope with creation. While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable, or even pointless, creativity is always meaningful. Vik Muniz Read Quote
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. Vik Muniz Read Quote
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. Vik Muniz Read Quote
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. Vik Muniz Read Quote
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?’ Vik Muniz Read Quote
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. Vik Muniz Read Quote
My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very – actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to – to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it. Vik Muniz Read Quote
