Quotes from Damien Hirst

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that's where belief lies and art as well.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.

A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything because I was spending a lot of time socialising and going out, but I've always managed to get work actually done.

I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.

The idea is more important than the object.

I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings.

Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality.

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in.

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.

Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It's not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it's sensational art... It's like touching skin.

In fact, the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking.

I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age - seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.

Kids are naturally gifted at art from a very young age. The problem is when they get older and become self-conscious. The process should always be fun, though.

Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, 'It can't be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it.' That's kind of stuck with me.

But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!

Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't.

Artists are like everybody else.