Andy Warhol Quotes

I’m not much for collecting quotes from famous people, but the quotes of pop artist Andy Warhol reveal who he was as an artist. They are so part and parcel of Andy Warhol’s public life and artist statement, that we’re making an exception here.

Besides, some really make us laugh. Sure you can find you some of use at your next art gallery reception.

(btw. the images with Andy Warhol Quotes are for sale).

Art Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on His Art

• I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.
• I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
• My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person.
• Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
• My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.
• The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems.

Andy Warhol Quotes on Art in General

• An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.
• An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
• Land really is the best art.
• I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

Andy Warhol Quotes on Money & Business

• Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.
• Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
• Employees make the best dates. You don’t have to pick them up and they’re always tax-deductible.
• I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.

Skull, c.1976 (White on Blue and Pink) Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on His Death and on Dieing

• Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
• Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.
• I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there.
• I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say “figment.”
• I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

Waiting Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on Living & Being Alive

• I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ”work,” because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
• Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
• They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
• People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.
  

  Love Affair Andy Warhol

• Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

Andy Warhol Quotes on Emotions

• During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.
• I like boring things.
• I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell?

Three’s a Party Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on Love, Sex, Dating & Partying

• Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.
• Sex is the biggest nothing of all time
• The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
• When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
• I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.
• I’m the type who’d be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn’t going to. I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.
• I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.
• The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.

Everybody Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on Society, Consumerism & Capitalism

• What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
• I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.
• I’ve decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.
• Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they’ll just have to learn how to be babies longer.
• Buying is much more American than thinking and I’m as American as they come.

The World Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on PR, the Media & Fame

• Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
• I’m confused about who the news belongs to. I always have it in my head that if you name’s in the news, then the news should be paying you. Because it’s your news and they’re taking it and selling it as their product…If people didn’t give the news their news, and if everybody kept their news to themselves, the news wouldn’t have any news.

Andy Warhol Quotes on Fame, Glamour & Personal Identity

• In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
  

  Fifteen Minutes Andy Warhol

• I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is “In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.”
• I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
• I am a deeply superficial person.
• If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.
• It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.
• I’ll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N’ ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!!

Fantasy Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes on Real versus Fake

• It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.
• Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
• People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television — you don’t feel anything.
• Drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to be to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women will actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection.