David Salle Quotes

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.

Spend a day talking only in rhyme.

For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.

Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted a lot of time not being bold enough, or still engaged in the questioning that you get into at school.

Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.

My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.

People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent.

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.

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

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.

What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.

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.

I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.

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

I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.

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.

I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that.

What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible; it's not the end of the world.

I have to say, that's pretty typical for artists, kind of embarrassingly typical for artists that everything is all about selection.

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

I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.

I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.