Quotes from Marcel Duchamp

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

Marcel, no more painting; go get a job.

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.

Art is all a matter of personality.

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

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.

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.

I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?

I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.

Humor is the only reason to live.

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

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.

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.

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.

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.

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.

In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society