Quotes from Marcel Duchamp

You get my idea. Nothing of "artistic" literature about it, just straight medicine, a universal panacea, a fetish in a sense: if you have a toothache go to your dentist and ask him if he is Dada.

Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.

D'ailleurs c'est toujours les autres qui meurent.

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are.

I don't believe in art. I believe in the artist.

The American woman is the most intelligent woman in the world today - the only one that always knows what she wants, and therefore always gets it. Hasn't she proved it by making her husband in his role as slave-banker look almost ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world? Not only has she intelligence but a wonderful beauty of line is hers, possessed by no other woman of any race at the present time.

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

They're such supreme egos. It's disgusting. I've never seen anything worse than an artist as a mind. It is very low, uninteresting as far as the relationship of men is concerned.

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

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

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

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

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

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Destruction is also creation.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

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.

I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.