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“In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements -- a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to over-power the ornamentation of the room.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera’s [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship between "the industrialist" and "the artist." Rivera remarked to Valentiner how especially struck he was that "Edsel had none of the characteristics of the exploiting capitalist, that he had the simplicity and directness of a workman in his won factories and was like one of the best of them." Their relationship was like the murals themselves, a superb expression of pluralism, toleration, and empathy for the other, and of a cosmopolitan sense of all the Americas, not just of the United States of America or Detroit alone.”
― John Dean

“While working in California, I met William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mentioned a desire which I had to paint a series of murals about the industries of the United States, a series that would constitute a new kind of plastic poem, depicting in color and form the story of each industry and its division of labor. Dr. Valentiner was keenly interested, considering my idea a potential base for a new school of modern art in America, as related to the social structure of American life as the art of the Middle Ages had been related to medieval society.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun.

This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“Finally I stopped in the ballroom that at night was the Heart of Water. My side ached from running and sweat prickled across my face. I sat down heavily and leaned back against the gold-painted wall to stare at the ceiling. Overhead, Apollo leered at Daphne, who fled from him in stylized terror; Persephone's silent screams looked much more genuine as Hades dragged her down to the underworld. But at least she had a mother who did not rest until she'd saved her.”
― Rosamund Hodge, Cruel Beauty

“When I ache, when I'm tired or just lonely living in the town on my own, I know I have to keep on going. I walk into my theater and see my stage which still calls out to me and pleads with me, "Use me. Create for me." It's there ready to offer itself for more creatively [sic]. It is up to me to use it again. My theater says to me, "Take me. Do something with me. I'm ready for the challenge. Give me something to live for; something to look forward to.”
― Marta Becket, To Dance on Sands: The Life And Art of Death Valley's Marta Becket