Artist Quotes

I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.

I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.

I always felt I needed to teach to survive.

But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

I don't like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn't important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.

I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns... your thought process goes on.

I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting.

Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

'Jackass: The Movie' is great. I think it's in the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body.

I've always thought of the project as a sort of sexually driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by hunger or anything like that.

An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it.

A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.

A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.

I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them.

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.

I was never a Boy Scout, but oh, I wanted to be one when I was a kid about ten or eleven years old. But there wasn't anyplace where I could ever join the Boy Scouts.

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.

I always felt myself to be an unlucky person like Donald, who is a victim of so many circumstances. But there isn't a person in the United States who couldn't identify with him. He is everything, he is everybody; he makes the same mistakes that we all make.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.