Quotes from Roy Lichtenstein

Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

Picasso's sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir? and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting.

I thought art was a sort of romantic life, or I don't know what I thought art was like. But I learned practically everything I know from Ohio State. And I'm really glad I went.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.

Popart was oorspronkelijk bedoeld als een belediging, maar al in 1963 moest Lichtensteien in een interview vaststellen dat het moeilijk was een schilderij te maken dat de mensen niet aan de wand zouden willen hangen: alles werd aan de wand gehangen, de mensen zouden eraan gewend raken. Zelfs tegen de alom afgewezen commerciële kunst was men niet haatdragend genoeg.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

I think art was the one thing my high school didn't give. And I think that was probably one reason why I was interested in it.

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.