Quotes from Keith Haring

I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people that doesn't.

Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well.... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.

The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

There is nothing that makes me happier than making a child smile.

Pure art exists only on the level of instant response to pure life

The dripping... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it's a natural part in the evolution of the work.

I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.

Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it.

The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.

Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.

I don't think art is propaganda it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people...that doesn't make you better than somebody who has no money but is sympathetic and genuinely loving to fellow human beings.