Quotes About Art

Anyone can look through my sketchbooks as long as they don't have a background in psychiatric medicine.

Some psychiatrist told me I was interested in sculpture because I dealt in flat surfaces and needed something with dimension.

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

The only reason I create something is because I'm chasing a feeling. You can use a bunch of musical or psychological operations to achieve that result.

I feel music-making is more like a psychological game; each film has its own colour that needs to be identified and addressed.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I'm not very good at depicting the characters' psychology on the page.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

There's a very different kind of psychology going on in the fashion scene than in art. When artists connect to a system because they want to make a living, it's their own choice. In fashion, designers don't have that choice.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

That is the effect of my sculptures in the public domain: people are making contact with each other again.

Art is about the 'I' in life not the 'we', about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn't acknowledge the private is a life not worth having.

Art shouldn't be prohibited in public schools when kids in private schools always get it.

I did cartoons for four high school publications and then and there decided I wanted to spend my life at the drawing board.

The art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency.

My heavily-cleverly disguised low self-regard manifested itself in my constant showing off, my addiction for publicity, and my intolerable 'me-me-me' attitudes and actions. But it's done, isn't it? And no one can really change, can they? And, hey, it has been a lot of fun being the life-long irresponsible, snarky, nasty art scamp.

Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.

We are always getting photos and publicity from people who want to act in Andy's movies. We always throw them away. They don't seem to realize that the last thing we'd put into a movie is an actor. Because all the other movies use actors.

I don't publish the books to make money, not at all.

It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't.

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

In 2011, 'Yourself in the World,' a book of my writings and interviews, was published in conjunction with a retrospective of my work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.