Quotes from Keith Haring

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

Nothing is important...so everything is important.

Children know something that most people have forgotten.

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

The public has a right to art The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. ... Art is for everybody. ... I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece.

Touching people's lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.

I am a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end.

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration).

I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.

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

Art is for everybody. To think that they—the public—do not appreciate art because they don't understand it, and to continue to make art that they don't understand and therefore become alienated from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn't understand or appreciate art and is thriving in this "self-proclaimed knowledge of art" that is actually bullshit.

I am becoming very hard on the outside and even softer on the inside.

I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain.

Art is life. Life is art. The importance of both is over-exaggerated as well as misunderstood.

Nothing is an end because it always can be a basis for something new and different.

People, I realize, cannot live like a patch of grass. They could, I suppose, at one time, but we are so far removed from that time that it is hard to conceive. People can, however, live their lives with the realization that they are constantly changing, products of their changing environment and changing situations, and time. They can live, at least, in harmony with the knowledge and co-exist with it instead of working against it.

Poems do not necessarily need words. Words do not necessarily make poems.

I think I was born an artist. I think I have a responsibility to live up to that. I've spent my life up to this point trying to find out just what that responsibility

Risks are what make the difference between new ideas and re-worked old ideas.

Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The

Art will never leave me and never should. So as I go into the next part of the trip I hope it will be more creative and more work involved and less talk and more doing, seeing, learning, being, loving, feeling, maybe less feeling, and just work my ass off, 'cause that, my friend, is where it's at!

Art has no meaning because it has many meanings, infinite meanings. Art is different for every individual, and is definable only by the given individual.

As in all things: Time will clarify the events that are presently unclear.