Quotes from Edward Ruscha

Perhaps there would be more anxiety in my work if I lived in New York.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work.

I have no social agenda with my work. I'm deadpan about it.

My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.

Good art should elicit a response of 'Huh? Wow!' as opposed to 'Wow! Huh?'

Work takes different forms. I can spend two or three days without completing anything, and it's choppy: it's filled with all kinds of irrationalities and stupid actions. I have some notion, and then I drop it because something else comes along. I'm forever darting from one side of the room to the other.

I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I've grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn't bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.