Quotes from Marcel Duchamp

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.

Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.

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.

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.

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.

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.

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.

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.

My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.

The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.

It's the viewer that makes the work.

I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do.

My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.

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.

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.'

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.