Quotes from David Salle

Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.

The most convincing works tend to be those in which the thinking is inseparable from the doing.

The late sculptor Ken Price put it best: "Nothing I can say is going to improve how it looks.

How a painter treats this edge is the real subject of realist painting; how the brush behaves in the vicinity of an edge gives a painting its present-tenseness, the feeling of the eternal present.

Artists, on the other hand, talk to determine what works, what does not, and why. Their focus is more on the micro; it moves from the inside out.

The right idea, one that is in productive sync with one's talents, can unlock a whole worldview. If that idea is also part of a sensibility that is forming and spreading in the larger culture, or zeitgeist, a multiplier effect comes into play, and the art will resonate strongly with the viewing public. We will feel that it expresses us.

good art illustrates anything at all, it's likely to be a story you didn't even know needed telling.

Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication. The act of paying close attention to what someone made, in all of its particulars, is what stimulates an authentic, as opposed to a conditioned, response.

One way to look at a painting—and I use that word as shorthand for visual art in general—is to notice as you take its measure what it is you actually find yourself thinking about, which may differ from what you imagine you're supposed to be thinking about.

I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.

The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.

As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.

Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often the time when it looks like anything but.

I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.

It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.

Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.

This is a little off subject, but I'm interested in those cases where someone is barking up the wrong tree, or misapplying their talent.

It's a mistake to ask a work of art to be all things to all people.