Damien Hirst Quotes

It's such a crass idea - you're either in love or out of love.

I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either.

I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds. Any artist's big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that's great.

It's very easy to say, 'I could have done that,' after someone's done it. But I did it. You didn't. It didn't exist until I did it.

I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

You've really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you've just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.

I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.

I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.

I realised that you couldn't use the tools of yesterday to communicate today's world. Basically, that was the big light that went on in my head.

The idea is more important than the object.

I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings.

I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I've found there aren't any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me.

I wanted a shark that's big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

I think money is important for everyone, because the lack of it is so painful.

I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.

I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.

Being best is a false goal, you have to measure success on your own terms.

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.

But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live.

I've never learned to drive because I get lots of ideas when I'm a passenger in a car. I love to get in a car with a driver and just think and work things out.

Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't.

Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.

But I'm more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg's my main influence.

The goal in life is to be solid, whereas the way that life works is totally fluid, so you can never actually achieve that goal.

I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.

It's ridiculous what I do. I can't believe in it - but I have to.

Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you're involved in that visual world, you can't really go backwards.

Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality.

As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it.

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time.

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.

Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.

But I could never make a judgement that something was obscene.

Because it's visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language - in advertising and stuff like that - which is around us.

I don't really have a career plan.

You've got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate.

The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

But for me, from my point of view, I don't mind if it falls over... if you break the glass you replace the glass, if the sheep falls out you can always get a new sheep.

I did a butterfly show in Berlin, and we had a guy who's an expert on butterflies; who bred them all and who looks after them all in the space.

Artists are like everybody else.

But then architects don't build their own houses.

When you've just done it, you're not sure. But when you've sat with it for a couple of hours and you don't want to do anything more to it, that's a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.