artists

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
 -- Andy Warhol
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In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
 -- Andy Warhol
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An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
 -- Andy Warhol
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If you're not trying to be real, you don't have to get it right. That's art.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.
 -- Andy Warhol
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We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.
 -- Andy Warhol
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My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat - or in film's case 'run on' - manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'
 -- Andy Warhol
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I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.
 -- Andy Warhol
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It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Land really is the best art.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
 -- Andy Warhol
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Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think everybody should like everybody.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Everyone needs a fantasy.
 -- Andy Warhol
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What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don't know whether I'm alive or whether I died. I wasn't afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn't feel fear. But I am afraid. I don't understand why.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I went to vote once, but I got too scared. I couldn't decide whom to vote for.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don't try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I am a deeply superficial person.
 -- Andy Warhol
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It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger.
 -- Andy Warhol
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During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.
 -- Andy Warhol
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When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is 'In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.'
 -- Andy Warhol
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Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
 -- Andy Warhol
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People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of 'work', because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I like to work when I'm not working - do something that may not be considered work, but to me it's work. Getting exercise by going to the grocery store.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Art is what you can get away with.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Fantasy love is much better than reality love.
 -- Andy Warhol
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If you wear a wig, everybody notices. But if you then dye the wig, people notice the dye.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains - daisy chains - of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between 'his,' 'her' or 'their' wish and yours.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I'm for mechanical art. When I took up silk screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
 -- Andy Warhol
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People sometimes say the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I want to die with my blue jeans on.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I always hear myself saying, 'She's a beauty!' or 'He's a beauty!' or 'What a beauty!' but I never know what I'm talking about.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil - of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape-record them. But I didn't think of myself as evil - just realistic.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something.
 -- Andy Warhol
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The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it's much more exciting.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I like boring things.
 -- Andy Warhol
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If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'
 -- Andy Warhol
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I'll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think Chris Burden is terrific. I really do.
 -- Andy Warhol
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When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.
 -- Andy Warhol
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The clothes of Courreges are so nice.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Art? That's a man's name.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Checks aren't money.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Voyeurism is a director's job description. It's an artist's, too.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think kids should go to high school until they're 30. No, really, because people are staying younger now and there's nothing to do. If you stayed longer, then it would be really great.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.
 -- Andy Warhol
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My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.
 -- Andy Warhol
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What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I want to be a machine.
 -- Andy Warhol
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I think they should have movies in restaurants. I can't believe that so many people get together just to sit there. It's so abstract... isn't it abstract? What are these people sitting here watching?
 -- Andy Warhol
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I've been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night... they'd just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it's so thrilling to go there. It really is.
 -- Andy Warhol
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So many people seem to prefer my silver-screenings of movie stars to the rest of my work. It must be the subject matter that attracts them, because my death and violence paintings are just as good.
 -- Andy Warhol
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The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Sociological critics are waste makers.
 -- Andy Warhol
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Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
 -- Salvador Dali
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At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
 -- Salvador Dali
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We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
 -- Salvador Dali
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I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
 -- Salvador Dali
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I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.
 -- Salvador Dali
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I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
 -- Salvador Dali
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There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
 -- Salvador Dali
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What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
 -- Salvador Dali
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There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
 -- Salvador Dali
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In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.
 -- Salvador Dali
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It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Let my enemies devour each other.
 -- Salvador Dali
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I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
 -- Salvador Dali
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Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
 -- Salvador Dali
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We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.
 -- Salvador Dali
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The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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It takes a long time to become young.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Action is the foundational key to all success.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Youth has no age.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Everything you can imagine is real.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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We don't grow older, we grow riper.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
 -- Pablo Picasso
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It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Good artists copy, great artists steal.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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There are only two types of women - goddesses and doormats.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
 -- Pablo Picasso
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There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!
 -- Pablo Picasso
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What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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One must act in painting as in life, directly.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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I do not seek. I find.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
 -- Pablo Picasso
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When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.
 -- Pablo Picasso
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In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Marcel, no more painting; go get a job.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Can works be made which are not 'of art'?
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.' Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on a canvas with a frame, they're called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer. We're all craftsmen, in civilian or military or artistic life.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Art is all a matter of personality.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a kind of constant euphoria.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I was highly attracted to chess for forty or forty-five years; then, little by little, my enthusiasm lessened.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it!
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?
 -- Marcel Duchamp
%
The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.
 -- Marcel Duchamp
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I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.
 -- Banksy
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Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.
 -- Banksy
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There's obviously nothing wrong with selling your art - only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it's confusing to know how far you should take it.
 -- Banksy
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Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.
 -- Banksy
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I wouldn't want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities.
 -- Banksy
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All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.
 -- Banksy
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I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies.
 -- Banksy
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You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
 -- Banksy
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I give away thousands of paintings for free.
 -- Banksy
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I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
 -- Banksy
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It's great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.
 -- Banksy
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The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.
 -- Shepard Fairey
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Propaganda has a negative connotation, which it partially deserves, but I think there is some propaganda that is very positive. I feel that if you can do something that gets people's attention, then maybe they'll go and find out more about the person.
 -- Shepard Fairey
%
When you walk down the street and see something in a crazy spot, there's something powerful about that. The street will always be an important part of getting art out there for me.
 -- Shepard Fairey
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For me, there has always been a disconnect with the sort of elitist structure of the high-art world - and my distaste for that is at odds with my feeling that art should aspire to do great things.
 -- Shepard Fairey
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Most campaigns rely on photographs because the moment you do something that is a graphic interpretation where any artistic license has been taken, I think a lot of people are scared that it's going to be perceived as propaganda.
 -- Shepard Fairey
%
I admire Ai Weiwei for his art and his activism. His art is beautiful in form, and in function embodies the principles of populism and social consciousness I aspire to in my own practice.
 -- Shepard Fairey
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When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.
 -- Shepard Fairey
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I've never really considered myself just a street artist. I consider myself a populist.
 -- Shepard Fairey
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Art shows and the institutions end up being the couriers for culture for the next generation and are an important component as well. It may seem ironic from one perspective, but I think if you look at my overall strategy, it's actually not out of step.
 -- Shepard Fairey
%
I don't have this obsessive need to do street art all the time because it's already opened doors for me.
 -- Shepard Fairey
%
The problem with copyright enforcement is that when the parameters aren't incredibly well defined, it means big corporations, who have deeper pockets and better lawyers, can bully people.
 -- Shepard Fairey
%
If you're creating something that has some sort of cultural currency - if the idea is getting out there - then that will probably yield money in some form, whether it's through selling art or selling books or being asked to give a lecture.
 -- Shepard Fairey
%
When I was 14, I thought I looked terrible. I wore these typical Slavic shoes with metal bottoms so you could always hear me coming and this really ugly princess skirt and blouse with the top button closed. I had a boy haircut, a baby face covered with pimples, and a really big nose.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
When you have a nonverbal conversation with a total stranger, then he can't cover himself with words, he can't create a wall.
 -- Marina Abramovic
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You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It's because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can't; it's impossible.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
We are used to cleaning the outside house, but the most important house to clean is yourself - your own house - which we never do.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We're looking at six or seven problems constantly. We're living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
It's very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something - like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child - and if you don't follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
My mother and father had a terrible marriage. They celebrated their wedding anniversary one year with their friends. Why did they celebrate? Maybe because they had lasted so many years without killing each other.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I believe so much in the power of performance I don't want to convince people. I want them to experience it and come away convinced on their own.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I notice if I'm too fat or if I'm too ugly or there's skin hanging or whatever. When my clothes start not fitting, I get really self-conscious about what I eat.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
To control the breathing is to control the mind. With different patterns of breathing, you can fall in love, you can hate someone, you can feel the whole spectrum of feelings just by changing your breathing.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night if I wasn't sleeping straight and was messing up the sheets. Now when I stay in hotels I sleep so straight they don't even think I've used the bed.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The big problem of our modern society is that we feel that we are separated from the nature. But it's just the opposite. We are interrelated and our DNA is the same. And only when human beings understand that, the nature will not be obstacle.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
You know, James Franco is one of the most interesting figures because he has no rules. He breaks all the borders.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
If you see a Renaissance body, this is completely ugly in this time. Everybody has to be skinny. But the Renaissance body with incredible flow of the meat everywhere, it was beauty.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
So many artists say they're not aware of audience. For me is unbelievable.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I really think there's no difference between an art piece made by a man and one made by a woman. Is it a good art piece or a bad art piece? Of course, if you're female, you're maybe dealing with different issues.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Every party is the same, too many people, too little food, and you have to wait around. I'm extremely bored with parties.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I don't know anything about the afterlife because I haven't been there yet.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The world doesn't need an artist who shows reality as it is.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I think 21st century should be art without objects.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
When people ask me where I am from I never say, 'Serbia.' I always say, 'I come from a country that no longer exists.'
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I hate kitchens. I don't understand these enormous American kitchens that take up half the living room and then they just order pizza.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That's a completely different thing.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
We make such terrible mistakes with visual choices about beauty.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Artists can do whatever they want!
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
For me, performance is a holy ground. When I perform, I really step into a different state of consciousness.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Woody Allen has a wonderful line: 'Today I'm a star. What will I be tomorrow? A black hole?' That's very important to know - that you have the moment, then you lose the moment. You have to see your chances, you have to take them, and you also have to see when you don't have chances to take.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Most of the time, the artists are not supposed to wear the fashion. It is always seen as a vanity. But I think I don't need to prove anything in my life. I can honestly say I love fashion and I can be many things at the same time.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I believe the artist has an obligation to society.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I don't do husbands. I don't do children.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
You know, everyone is always talking about plastic surgery, or the technology, what to do. I really think it's important to help yourself with the technology if you want to feel better, but I am absolutely against any kind of monstrous cuts of the body, lifting that is beyond recognition, this kind of stuff.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I'm interested in asking: 'What does feminine energy mean?' I don't have answers - I just have questions and interesting examples.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
When Lady Gaga says I am her inspiration, you reach kids between 12 and 18. Now I am like a brand - jeans, Coca-Cola.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Being an artist is not easy - I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It's a huge sacrifice.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
An artist should not fall in love with another artist.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn't exist in the present here and now.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Theater is something that as a performance artist you have to hate.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
One of the most wonderful things for me is to watch somebody else perform, where I am the audience - I love this more than ever.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I didn't get paid for performances most of my life. If I did, I would be billionaire now, and I'm not.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
You know, art is very emotional business. But mostly it becomes not emotional, the fabric of commodity. It becomes business. It becomes so many different things. Because we forgot there was emotions involved.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
If you do performance and music, it's not performance as music.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
In my work I have complete control, but about my life, I don't want to.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Artists should never think of themselves as an idol. Fame is a side effect of one's work.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Once you live in New York, you can't live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It's so bourgeois. I get so bored.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
The mind is crazy thing. To be focused is the most difficult thing.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I believe that life is shorter; that is why we have to make experience longer.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Why am I not feminist? Maybe because I come from a country where my mother ruled my life. I never felt in any way that I couldn't achieve what I want.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I want to dominate the man's world.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
People in New York never have time for anything.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I am very clear that I am not a feminist. It puts you into a category and I don't like that.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
An artist has to look at the future, to see what we can do better.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Cancer is an emotional disease.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
Americans don't like European movies.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
In America, everyone's always hiding their age.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself, but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it.
 -- Marina Abramovic
%
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I paint flowers so they will not die.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
My painting carries with it the message of pain.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I love you more than my own skin.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I am my own muse, the subject I know best.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
Painting completed my life.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes. Aside from that, I like nothing. My head is too small.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
Of the opposite sex, I have the moustache and, in general, the face.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste. They are boring, and they all have faces like unbaked rolls.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I was a child who went about in a world of colors... My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I don't know how to write love letters.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
I am happy to be alive, as long as I can paint.
 -- Frida Kahlo
%
Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.
 -- Nam June Paik
%
Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.
 -- Nam June Paik
%
The future is now.
 -- Nam June Paik
%
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
 -- John Cage
%
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
 -- John Cage
%
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
 -- John Cage
%
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
 -- John Cage
%
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
 -- John Cage
%
When we separate music from life we get art.
 -- John Cage
%
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
 -- John Cage
%
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
 -- John Cage
%
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
 -- John Cage
%
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
 -- John Cage
%
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
 -- John Cage
%
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'
 -- John Cage
%
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
 -- John Cage
%
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
 -- John Cage
%
The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The position of the artist if humble. He is essentially a channel.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
I am only satisfied insofar as I feel 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' is a definite progress, but even about this picture I am not quite satisfied. There is still too much of the old in it.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Only conscious man can mirror the universal: he can consciously become one with the universal and so can consciously transcend the individual.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Everything is expressed through relationship. Colour can exist only through other colours, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal thing.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
I do not know how I shall develop, but for the present, I am continuing to work within ordinary, generally known terrain, different only because of a deep substratum, which leads those who are receptive to sense the finer regions.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
It is not important to make many pictures but that I have one picture right.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The desire for freedom and equilibrium (harmony) is inherent in man (due to the universal in him).
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Art is the path to being spiritual.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Things are beautiful or ugly only in time and space. The new man's vision being liberated from these two factors, all is unified in one unique beauty.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
All that is base in the masses is temporary, no doubt serving only to prevent evolution (that of the elite, as well) from proceeding too quickly and thus not becoming 'reality.'
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
We must look not to the negative (the misery, the bestial in life), although we undergo it and sympathize with it, but rather to the burgeoning life around us, which is strengthened by the negative.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures - but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist's own art.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating 'expression' of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means - dynamic rhythm.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but feels and thinks.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
As tradition, the female element clings to the old art and opposes anything new - precisely because each new art moves further away from the natural appearance of things.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The spiritual (i.e. the supersensory) has many degrees; thus, the term 'spiritual' is used both for the scale of degrees away from the physical towards the spirit, but also only for the spiritual proper.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract - like the mathematical - is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The positive and negative states of being bring about action. They cause the loss of balance and of happiness. They cause the eternal revolutions - the changes that follow one upon the other. They explain why happiness cannot be achieved in time.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
By turning from the surface, one comes closer to the inner laws of matter, which are also the laws of the Spirit.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Many appreciate in my former work just what I did not want to express, but which was produced by an incapacity to express what I wanted to express - dynamic movement in equilibrium. But a continuous struggle for this statement brought me nearer. This is what I am attempting in 'Victory Boogie Woogie.'
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
It has become progressively clearer that the plastic expression of true reality is attained through dynamic movement in equilibrium. Plastic art affirms that equilibrium can only be established through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The clarification of equilibrium through plastic art is of great importance for humanity. It reveals that although human life in time is doomed to disequilibrium, notwithstanding this, it is based on equilibrium. It demonstrates that equilibrium can become more and more living in us.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Reality only appears to us tragical because of the disequilibrium and confusion of its appearances.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The subjectivization of the universal in art brings the universal downward on one hand, while on the other it helps raise the individual toward the universal.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Subjectivity ceases to exist only when the mutation-like leap is made from subjectivity to objectivity, from individual existence to universal existence.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.
 -- Piet Mondrian
%
Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Water is the driving force of all nature.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Learning never exhausts the mind.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Our life is made by the death of others.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Who sows virtue reaps honor.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The natural desire of good men is knowledge.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Medicine is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Many are they who have a taste and love for drawing, but no talent; and this will be discernible in boys who are not diligent and never finish their drawings with shading.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The Medici created and destroyed me.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
I have always felt it is my destiny to build a machine that would allow man to fly.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Life well spent is long.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Nature never breaks her own laws.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
I have wasted my hours.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Our body is dependant on Heaven and Heaven on the Spirit.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.
 -- Leonardo da Vinci
%
Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
For all the tough talk about China during the presidential debates, Romney and Obama evaded any mention of China's suspect human rights record, corruption, and rule of law. By not tackling these controversial topics, the candidates are protecting a strategic partnership with China at the expense of essential human values and beliefs.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
When you have strict censorship of the internet, young students cannot receive a full education. Their view of the world is imbalanced. There can be no true discussion of the issues.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The seed is a household object but at the same time it is a revolutionary symbol.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The Olympic Games are highly commercialised. They purport to follow the traditions of an ancient athletics competition, but today it is the commercial aspect that is most apparent. I have seen how, through sport, cities and corporations compete against each other for financial gain.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice. Everybody can be subjected to harm. I'm just a citizen: my life is equal in value to any other. But I'm thankful that when I lost my freedom so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort into helping me.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Censorship is saying: 'I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.' But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist's activity... In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
This nation is notorious for its ability to make or fake anything cheaply. 'Made-in-China' goods now fill homes around the world. But our giant country has a small problem. We can't manufacture the happiness of our people.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
To the media, I have become a symbolic figure, critical of China. According to the government, I am a dangerous threat.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Chinese citizens have never had the right to really express their opinions; in the constitution it says you can, but in the real world it is more dangerous. In the west people think it's a right they're born with. Here it's a right given by the government, and one that's not really practised.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
For me, it is OK as long as I can breathe, as long as my heart is pumping, as long as I can express myself.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want - not only you, your whole family and all people like you.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I call on people to be 'obsessed citizens,' forever questioning and asking for accountability. That's the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
To survive, China had to open up to the West. It could not survive otherwise. This was after many millions have died of hunger in a country that was like North Korea is today. Once we became part of global competition, we had to agree to some rules. It's painful, but we had to. Otherwise there was no way to survive.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo show just how much effort China is willing to spend to enter the global stage. But while China desires to understand the world, it fails to accept its universal values.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am. As long as I can communicate, I'm not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn't matter at all.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The American experience influenced my understanding of individuality, basic human rights, freedom of expression and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
China is an old nation with a colourful history. Its booming economy has triggered an appetite and a curiosity around the world for its art and culture, one that continues to grow. I can, however, tell people that it is a show with no actor.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
A nation that has no music and no fairytales is a tragedy.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Historically, China is not a nation of sportsmen. We traditionally put more emphasis on being close to nature than pushing endlessly to excel. A philosophy that values tranquil contemplation of the landscape cannot easily be adapted to the Olympic slogan of 'higher, stronger, faster.'
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I think Chinese leadership is trying to tell the world they have another set of logic or reasoning or values which are different from yours. Of course, I don't think they believe that. It's just an argument that's made when you can't confront the truth and facts. They really want to maintain power.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Beijing's Olympics were very grand - they were trying to throw a party for the world, but the hosts didn't enjoy it. The government didn't care about people's feelings because it was trying to create an image.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
If we all say the same thing, then I think the government has to listen. But because no one is saying it, I become singled out, even though what I'm saying is common sense. It's very essential values that we all have to protect. But in Chinese society, people are giving up on protecting these values.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I'm most embarrassed at my art shows, even though I don't show it.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Recently I danced in a video spoof of the song 'Gangnam Style,' and it was quickly banned across multiple Chinese online video platforms. But the story still traveled all over the world, carried in hundreds of international media reports.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I don't think it's worth discussing new directions in the context of Chinese art - there were no old directions, either. Chinese art has never had any clear orientation.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Because Great Britain has self-confidence, it doesn't need a monumental Olympics.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Because of the economic crisis, China and the United States are bound together. This is a totally new phenomenon, and nobody will fight for ideology anymore. It's all about business.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I'm always followed by two or three cars and have police around. Even walking in the park, you see them taking photos behind the bushes and trying to videotape everything.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
So maybe there are three parts in my life - earlier background living in exile in Xinjiang in a very political circumstance, then later the United States from 24 to 36 years old. I was quite equipped with liberal thinking. Then the Internet. If there is no Internet, of course, I cannot really exercise my opinion or my ideas.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Since the global economic crisis began, the change in global attitudes is clear to see - and I think it is pitiful. Barack Obama came to China and he is probably the only president of the United States never to mention the words 'human rights' in public.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
Now the British are coming. I think Cameron should ask the Chinese government not to make people 'disappear' or to jail them merely because they have different opinions.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
This week, the world gathers in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games. This is the extraordinary moment China has been dreaming of for 100 years. People have been longing for this moment, because it symbolises a turning point in China's relationship with the outside world.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
The 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium, which I helped to conceive, is designed to embody the Olympic spirit of 'fair competition.' It tells people that freedom is possible but needs fairness, courage and strength.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
I don't believe in the so-called Olympic spirit. I speak from personal experience. When China hosted the Games, it failed to include the people. The event was constructed without regard for their joy.
 -- Ai Weiwei
%
A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.
 -- Man Ray
%
Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.
 -- Man Ray
%
I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.
 -- Man Ray
%
It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.
 -- Man Ray
%
An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.
 -- Man Ray
%
I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.
 -- Man Ray
%
One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.
 -- Man Ray
%
All critics should be assassinated.
 -- Man Ray
%
Don't put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.
 -- Man Ray
%
To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.
 -- Man Ray
%
I'd paint long strips of canvas and abandon them on the beach, or put bread out in geometric patterns for the pigeons downtown. I wanted people to find something nice and intriguing to puzzle over. Then I'd go back to see if the things were still there, or if anyone would notice.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I wanted to support things that are helpful to people and maybe bash what I think is dangerous. So I switched from being everybody to being myself.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Lack of charisma can be fatal.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Protect me from what I want.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I used language because I wanted to offer content that people - not necessarily art people - could understand.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Sloppy thinking gets worse over time.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
The most profound things are inexpressible.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Expiring for love is beautiful but stupid.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
One thing that changed when I moved upstate was that I became interested in different materials. I started making the stone benches because I was seeing rocks.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Well, I think in trying to make life seem real enough that one is moved to do something about the more atrocious things. By going really far afield into a completely fake world, maybe there's a chance to make things resonant somehow - or in this case, truly terrifying. To make it as bad as the real stuff that's happening.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration. If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
That's the test of street art - to see if anybody stopped. People would cross out ones they didn't like and would star others. I liked that people would engage with them.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not. Then I swill tea around 8 a.m. I answer e-mail, while I stall thinking about whatever scares me.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I really like doing the laundry, because I succeed at it. But I loathe putting it away. It is already clean.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
It can be kind of gruesome at times, making things alone.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
The epiphany for me was that I wasn't a writer, and I had to do something with these texts. I put them in the streets as posters.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
It's fun wandering around other people's minds.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I suspect you've noticed that making art can be lonely.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I'd been doing projects outdoors for the public. I made pigeons eat geometry by putting bread out in rhomboids and triangles. I don't know if this activity made sense, but the work was available.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I'm always trying to bring unusual content to a different audience - a non-art-world audience.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I am not free because I can be exploded anytime.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
On the worst days, I don't feel like an artist.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Company makes my day.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
I moved to New York in the 1970s and started writing when I was at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
One of the glories and terrors of working in public is that you do see if your output means anything to anyone.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
When my daughter was young, she thought all electronic signs were mine.
 -- Jenny Holzer
%
Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Look, we're all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I've chosen to make my work about that insanity.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
There's a moment of recognition. It's that white-light kind of stuff that just 'works.' I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it's a movie, music, a building, a book.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Women's art, political art - those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I've never worked in advertising - my experience was as an editorial designer for magazines - but you could say, in the bigger picture, that magazines are vehicles for colour advertising.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think that designers have an incredibly broad creative repertoire. They solve. They create images of perfection for any number of clients. I could never do that. I'm my client. That's the difference between an artist and a designer; it's a client relationship.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Teaching at university isn't like teaching in an art school.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
One thing I learned working at magazines was that if you couldn't get people to look at a page or a cover, then you were fired. It was all about how you create arresting works, and by arresting I mean stop people, even for a nano-second.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I've always been very tied to language.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.
 -- Barbara Kruger
%
I start a picture and I finish it.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I'm not a real person. I'm a legend.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Some days I can't get an idea, and I think, 'Man, I'm just washed up,' but it's just a mood.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I am not a black artist, I am an artist.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
The more I paint the more I like everything.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
There are about 30 words around you all the time, like 'thread' or 'exit.'
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I had very few friends. There was nobody I could trust. I left home when I was fifteen. I lived in Washington Square Park.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
My favorite Twombly is 'Apollo and the Artist,' with the big 'Apollo' written across it.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Believe it or not, I can actually draw.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I wanted to build up a name for myself.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I like kids' work more than work by real artists any day.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
If I'm away from painting for a week, I get bored.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Charles Saatchi has never liked my work at all.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Medicine men live in caves.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
For a while, I was drawing on good paper, but now I've gone back to the bad stuff. I put matte medium on it. If you put matte medium on it, it seals up, so it doesn't really matter.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
I was a cute kid.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
My basic influence had probably been Peter Max.
 -- Jean-Michel Basquiat
%
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The sky is always there for me, while my life has been going through many, many changes. When I look up the sky, it gives me a nice feeling, like looking at an old friend.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The regret of my life is that I have not said 'I love you' often enough.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Every moment in our lives is a miracle we should enjoy instead of ignoring.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Being alone is very difficult.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Sometimes I am happy and sometimes not. I am, after all, a human being, you know. And I am glad that we are sometimes happy and sometimes not. You get your wisdom working by having different emotions.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Every drop in the ocean counts.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I don't think you should always stay calm in a tense situation, because you might not ever confront the problem. Maybe it's better to actually let yourself be tense - and find a solution.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
People think that their world will get smaller as they get older. My experience is just the opposite. Your senses become more acute. You start to blossom.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
A lot of things have been thrown at me in life, and I've got through it all without a rule book, taking it one day at a time.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Remember, each one of us has the power to change the world. Just start thinking peace, and the message will spread quicker than you think.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Healing yourself is connected with healing others.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
There's a long life ahead of you and it's going to be beautiful, as long as you keep loving and hugging each other.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
To me, the concept of distance is not important. Distance doesn't exist, in fact, and neither does time. Vibrations from love or music can be felt everywhere, at all times.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I never want projects to be finished; I have always believed in unfinished work. I got that from Schubert, you know, the 'Unfinished Symphony.'
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The nice thing about the gallery shows is that without having to pay any money you can just go and see it.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
You can't always be in awe of someone's talent, living with them.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
We are all dreamers creating the next world, the next beautiful world for ourselves and for our children.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
DJs are in incredible competition, musically. And they are the most musically creative and sensitive people in all the music charts. I am amazed how they are.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Our public officials have forgotten that they are ultimately accountable to the people who put them in office, that the information they keep in secrecy belongs to all of us.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The human race is a very, very magical race. We have a magic power of witches and wizards. We're here on this earth to unravel the mystery of this planet. The planet is asking for it.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When I turned 60, it didn't bother me at all.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
It is very difficult for us to know we love somebody because it is an insecure position to be in. But in the end, it is important to be honest about your love because life is not that long.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I did not break up the Beatles. You can't have it both ways. If you're going to blame me for breaking the Beatles up, you should be thankful that I made them into myth rather than a crumbling group.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When I got pregnant, I had to concentrate on being pregnant for a whole nine months, even though I knew it was ruining my career at the time.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I relate to happiness as an ecstatic moment - something you don't create, you encounter.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Your private life is really very important for you. You know, all of us, you know.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I think if you give in and accept society's stereotypes, then you start thinking, 'I cannot dance till late at night because I'm 70.'
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Marriage is a difficult project. When seven years have passed and all your body's cells have been replaced, you're meant to experience that seven-year itch.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I was born into a very important family in Japan. My grandfather was a descendant of the Emperor, and we were very wealthy.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Marriage is a gamble, let's be honest.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
My husband John Lennon was a very special man. A man of humble origin, he brought light and hope to the whole world with his words and music.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Women have become stronger, and there's a backlash. Men have become terribly possessive. I find it much easier to get on with women.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
You change the world by being yourself.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I am extremely rebellious. I have this strong, defiant spirit.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I just want to be healthy and stay alive and keep my family going and everything and keep my friends going and try to do something so that this world will be peaceful. That is the most ambitious and the most difficult thing, but I'm there trying to do it.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When I speak out against the guns or against the big corporations, some of my friends say, 'Oh Yoko, be careful. These people have all the power.' But, you know, most people don't speak out because they are frightened.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
We're growing up together, the human race. And we've discovered a lot of things that we didn't know. We're finding our way. Instead of thinking about doomsday all the time, think about how beautiful the world is. We're all together, and together we're getting wiser.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
If your life changes, we can change the world, too.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
If you have too many quotes from other people in your head, you can't create. You have to keep your head empty. That's why I am constantly enjoying the sky, the park, the walk.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The thing that would most improve my life is 27 hours in a day. I could meet all my deadlines.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I'm kind of honored to be a dragon lady. The dragon is a very powerful, mythical animal.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Artists and musicians of the Sixties were definitely into clothes.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I realized that if my thoughts immediately affect my body, I should be careful about what I think. Now if I get angry, I ask myself why I feel that way. If I can find the source of my anger, I can turn that negative energy into something positive.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Energy is so important. If you don't have it, don't bother with rock and roll.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I saw that nothing was permanent. You don't want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
What the Beatles did was something incredible, it was more than what a band could do. We have to give them respect.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I'm a very obsessive type. If I do get into it, I'll soon be there 12 hours a day. I just don't want to do that.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
John wrote with a very deep love for the human race and a concern for its future.
 -- Yoko Ono
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People make music to get a reaction. Music is communication.
 -- Yoko Ono
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The cynicism that you have is not your real soul.
 -- Yoko Ono
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True artists are prophets. I don't want to be that prophetic in that sense because it's so lonely.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Artists are going to be the metronome of this society.
 -- Yoko Ono
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When you go to war, both sides lose totally.
 -- Yoko Ono
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All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!
 -- Yoko Ono
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Distance doesn't exist, in fact, and neither does time. Vibrations from love or music can be felt everywhere, at all times.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Events are the best teacher for us. You try to learn from people, there is always some bend to it.
 -- Yoko Ono
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It's a waste of time to think that if you colored a painting red what might have happened if you painted it black.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Is truth always positive? Of course. Once the truth comes out, you know, it's all right. We're scared that if the truth comes out that it's not all right. It's the other way around.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I have only one life, so I want to make sure it's a good one.
 -- Yoko Ono
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When you are suffering, you become more understanding about yourself, but also about other people's sufferings too. That's the first step to understand somebody is to understand their sufferings. So then love follows.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I trust myself. You need that to survive.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Countries have lost their culture because what they wanted was money. Money became the running theme in every country and culture was sacrificed.
 -- Yoko Ono
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When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.
 -- Yoko Ono
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You know, something happened to me when I became 70. I started to feel a tremendous love for the human race, and life and this planet, the universe, the whole shebang.
 -- Yoko Ono
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People are still thinking of solving problems by violence and war, and that has to stop.
 -- Yoko Ono
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People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can't read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Even my mother told me: 'You are a handsome woman, but you're not pretty. Pretty girls don't have those big bones.'
 -- Yoko Ono
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The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Women are very intelligent and not appreciated. We try to pretend that we are not clever, and it's such a pity that we can't show how clever we are.
 -- Yoko Ono
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When you are totally depressed, you should try giggling. Just make yourself laugh. Force yourself to laugh.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Losing my daughter was a very serious pain. There was always some empty space in my heart.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting.
 -- Yoko Ono
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We don't live by just sleeping and eating. We need pride and dignity in our lives. Work gives you that.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Art is like breathing for me. If I don't do it, I start to choke.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I think energy is the most important thing that we can give to people as performers. Anything else is a little bit pretentious. But energy is not.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I think that there is a sort of spiritual power that is translating into our bodies as we perform. Performers give, and giving is so important. It can heal. That is my experience, anyway.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When people ask me what the most important thing is in life, I answer: 'Just breathe.'
 -- Yoko Ono
%
In the '60s we fought for peace, when the Vietnam war was on. We were against the cops and against the politicians, and there was a lot of waving banners and all that. And I think in a way, just as they were enjoying that machoism of war, we were enjoying the machismo of being anti-war, you know?
 -- Yoko Ono
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Women are put in a position of feeling embarrassed about their bodies. It's so ridiculous, but also astounding - we have to always be apologetic about having created the human race.
 -- Yoko Ono
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There's many women now who think, 'Surely we don't need feminism anymore, we're all liberated and society's accepting us as we are'. Which is just hogwash. It's not true at all.
 -- Yoko Ono
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My father was a banker, but he was an independent spirit. He was a very good pianist and very much into music.
 -- Yoko Ono
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After my husband John Lennon passed away, I tried to smile for my health.
 -- Yoko Ono
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This society is driven by neurotic speed and force accelerated by greed and frustration of not being able to live up to the image of men and woman we have created for ourselves; the image has nothing to do with the reality of people.
 -- Yoko Ono
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The whole world is starting to realize that it was the most unwise thing for our society to have ignored women power, to run the society with male priorities.
 -- Yoko Ono
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You can be lonely when you have a guy living with you.
 -- Yoko Ono
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To have a relationship that is pure and passionate and beautiful - I think people are scared of having that now. Especially guys.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Mothers are not supposed to give guidance.
 -- Yoko Ono
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My beauty secret is... nothing! I don't drink too much water. I don't eat very well. Sometimes I cheat and grab some chocolate. The best thing is to eat what you want, but not very much.
 -- Yoko Ono
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My first husband met me as a career woman, and the second did, too. I was lucky.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I like artists who have something to say, not wallpaper.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When you go through a negative situation, don't think about it. Make it positive.
 -- Yoko Ono
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One day, the dance charts will be the biggest chart in the music world. Because we all need to dance. This planet will be a fun planet when the judges in court will end the day with a dance!
 -- Yoko Ono
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Nothing is written in stone. So don't prepare yourself for a long and lucrative career. You might die tomorrow. Your gold holdings might become dust. Just make the music you want to make now and enjoy it.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I am aware of the sufferings of women in India, which is also the suffering of women in many, many countries on our planet. My heart is filled with empathy and love for them.
 -- Yoko Ono
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There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I'm just being normal. A normal woman. Well, I don't know what a normal woman is, but I'm a woman and I'm  -- Yoko and I've never changed that.
 -- Yoko Ono
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The universe, when you leave it alone, is going to be beautiful.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I admire all people who are trying to be a good power in this chaotic world.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I get very nervous before I get on the stage, but once I'm on the stage, I'm just, you know, me. Nothing hurts me.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Reality can be elastic, and I want to see how elastic it can be, you know?
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The process is always the same. I get an inspiration for a new song, I put it down on paper immediately so I won't lose it. When I am ready to go to the studio with it, I play it a few times on the piano and edit, add, and type the lyrics and take it to the studio. Sometimes I don't have anything on paper.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
My heart is mysteriously alive in the world of sounds - a totally different dimension from the daily life.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Some people think that movements, such as the movements in ballet, are a higher cultural expression, whereas some are just dirt. I think it is elitist to think that a trained movement is more acceptable than untrained and possibly unrehearsed movements.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I travel a lot, so when I arrive in a city, I like to go to good local bookshops and make a selection based on how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. The book I pick usually seems to have a definite karmic connection!
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Words are power. And a book is full of words. Be careful what power you get from it. But know that you do.
 -- Yoko Ono
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You can be very wild and still be very wise.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don't mean to brag, but I'm so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we'll get used to it. I'm sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
If everybody thinks of something, then it will happen. Your mind is part of the universe. It is connected, you can use its energy.
 -- Yoko Ono
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The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I just go with the flow, so any style can be in my music - that makes it exciting.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I think of John every day. I do try to block it, but December 8th is not the only day I think of him.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Most of the fans of John Lennon and maybe John and  -- Yoko are younger than me.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
At least I had that, one guy understood me.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I'm not going to doubt my life.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Art is my life and my life is art.
 -- Yoko Ono
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War is over if you want it.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited.
 -- Yoko Ono
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But only art and music have the power to bring peace.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Power is power. It's energy. And if you get big, big energy, you can use that in a good way.
 -- Yoko Ono
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You can't always measure the effects of activist work; you just have to wish and pray that the message gets through.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Art for me is like breathing.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Music is like my security blanket.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Women artists are still treated differently from men.
 -- Yoko Ono
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People don't remember each tree in a park but all of us benefit from the trees. And in a way, artists are like trees in a park.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I'm very thankful that I can make people happy just by signing my name.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I don't think about the future. I don't think about the past. I just think of what comes into my head at the time. So that might be about the past, that might be about the future. Or, the present.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
We know that our cells are speaking to each other.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
We artists have the dignity to tell the truth to the people, unlike politicians.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Society tells you that when you're old you have to retire. You have to defy that.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Please know that being 80 is not a scary thing. When you're 80, your life is much freer.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Sometimes the father feels pushed out because of the connection between the mother and the child.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Chemically speaking or biologically, we research things, but we don't know half of them. We only know our half of it - symbolically - and we don't know ourselves more than half.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it's about her.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
After I was 70, I realized that, 'Okay, I would like to have another 50 years, and I probably could.' But part of me is saying, 'Maybe I'm not going to have that much time.'
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I don't believe in a chronological way of doing things.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
My career? I never think of it as a 'career.' Art and music and all those things that I'm creating are just part of me.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
All I can say is, it's not very easy for a woman to be associated with The Beatles.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I always thought that I was an important musician. If you don't have that confidence, why would you go on and do it?
 -- Yoko Ono
%
People accuse artists of being narcissists - of course we are! If we don't like ourselves, who's going to like us?
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I never thought I would go into the dance charts.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I'm free from holding personal anger because I can express what I want through my music.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I see so many activists... who are artists because they feel that they have the power of communication.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I was being hated for about 40 or 50 years by the whole world, but it did not destroy me, and it did not ruin my health. And the reason is because I just did not answer them. I had my own life.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Fracking is an incredible risk to the human race, I don't know why they even thought of doing it.
 -- Yoko Ono
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It's a waste to not say anything with art.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I think that there is incredible prejudice about witches while there is no prejudice about wizards. Words are very important, and I'm really into destroying myths.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
The war industry people are very together; they know exactly what they want; they don't even have to talk to each other. The peace industry people are just intellectuals who are very critical of each other... Unless the peace industry is powerful, we're always going to have war. It is as simple as that.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I have been known as the minimal and conceptual artist for over five decades. I think I haven't changed much.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Bad stories are written about me because the press knows they can make me into a weeping dog and few people will object.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I don't have a goal. I don't limit myself to a goal.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Dancing is a very healthy thing to do for our body.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Money is not everything. We don't need billions and trillions of dollars.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When I'm putting some communication out on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, I think that it's helping me, my brain, you know, because it's always somehow stimulated by people who are sending things to me. And it works both ways. It's great. My brain is very happy about it.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I'm not interested so much in collaboration. You see that from the history of my albums.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
People just love to be entertained, and in order to entertain them, you have to do things in a way that they understand.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I must say that I always thought I had a voice, even when I was 4 years old.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I've always said that I use my voice as an instrument. It was something I created myself, and I said, 'Have voice, will travel.'
 -- Yoko Ono
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I think there is a big difference between the music business and music. And my relationship is to music, not music business. I think the business will keep changing, but music won't. Music will be there.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Sound as medium has an incredible elasticity. So, of course, it is tempting for artists of other fields to try something with sounds. Why not? We are living in the age when there is no limit in gathering all forms of art and music to mix it together if you so desire.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Many people do remember their births, but they deny it.
 -- Yoko Ono
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The Beatles were a group made up of four very complex men, and my small hand could not have broken these men up.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I just like to explore all sorts of different forms - no, 'explore' is not even the word - enjoy. You don't want to limit yourself to a particular form.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I feel that my work is not in vain, that it does have a place in society, even though it may not be considered that it has a place in society - it doesn't matter.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Fracking kills, and it doesn't just kill us. It kills the land, nature and, eventually, the whole world.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
My life was pretty rough.
 -- Yoko Ono
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No one person could have broken up a band, especially one the size of the Beatles.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Life with another person is always difficult.
 -- Yoko Ono
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What we do really affects the world. Most of us think we can't do anything, but it really isn't true.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Why do they cover Paul's songs but never mine?
 -- Yoko Ono
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Japanese are very proud and workaholics. Proud workaholics.
 -- Yoko Ono
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The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I respect Lady Gaga very much.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Having a son is not all pleasure.
 -- Yoko Ono
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When people don't understand my work, I don't feel like explaining.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Many of my songs were dance orientated from way back. That's because I love dance! When I hear a dance number, just hearing the first eight bars, it immediately makes my bod start moving and dancing.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I think it's nice to let people know that there is an invisible part of the world. I think there are many people now who are interested in the invisible world.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When Orientals are attacked, they don't hit back.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Many incredible artists die before they were famous.
 -- Yoko Ono
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I just wish that people will be kinder to me when I pass away.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
I don't have time to listen to anybody's music. I'm making it, you know.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
Most people like to hear sounds they are used to.
 -- Yoko Ono
%
When you're imagining peace, you can't kill anyone. That's good isn't it?
 -- Yoko Ono
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We live too long for one marriage.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Art is a mind-game that we do to make our lives easier. If it isn't for that, it becomes superfluous.
 -- Yoko Ono
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Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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Every good painter paints what he is.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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My painting does not come from the easel.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
 -- Jackson Pollock
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When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.
 -- Jackson Pollock
%
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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The days you work are the best days.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%
I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
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Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
 -- Georgia O'Keeffe
%