100+ Andy Warhol Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden (2000). “In the power of painting: a selection from the Daros Collection”

Topics: I Still Care

The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.

Topics: Interviewers, He Wants Me

I can't bear to let all this beautiful talk go by. Everybody says... fantastic things. People are always putting it down as an invasion of privacy, but I think everyone should be bugged all the time... bugged and photographed.

Topics: Invasion Of Privacy

I admit to having worn suede and leather pants myself for a while, but you just never feel clean, and it's degenerate, anyway, to wear animal skins.... So I went back to bluejeans after my degenerate period.

Topics: Leather Pants

Security breeds stagnation.

Topics: Stagnation

That's the hard part of overdosing on cherries-you have all the pits to tell you exactly how many you ate. Not more or less. Exactly. One-seed fruits really bother me for that reason. That's why I'd always rather eat raisins than prunes. Prune pits are even more imposing than cherry pits.

Topics: Raisins, Prunes, Imposing

The key of the success of Studio 54 is that it’s a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor.

source: - Andy Warhol, Bob Colacello (1979). “Andy Warhol's exposures”

Topics: Studio 54, Dance Floor

Uptown is for people who have already done something. Downtown is where they’re doing something now. I live uptown but I love downtown.

Topics: Uptown

I don't believe people die. They just go uptown. To Bloomingdales. They just take longer to get back.

Topics: Uptown

I'd rather do new stuff. The old stuff is better to talk about than to see. It always sounds better than it really is.

source: - Andy Warhol, Mark Francis, Mattjis Visser, Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2004). “Andy Warhol: the late work”, Prestel Publishing

Topics: Old Stuff, New Stuff

The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Stockholm

When the Woolworth's-Hot-Fudge-Sundae switch goes on, then I know I really have something.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.156, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Sundaes, Fudge

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you 've pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books.

source: - "Andy Warhol: a retrospective".

Topics: Movies And Music

I really do live for the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.126, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Live Futures

You'd be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background color matches the drapes.

source: - "Andy Warhol: In His Own Words". Book by Mike Wrenn, 1991.

Topics: Living Room Wall, Living Room, Electric Chair, Drapes, Room Wall

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.'

source: - Andy Warhol, Kynaston McShine (1989). “Andy Warhol: a retrospective”

Topics: Figments

Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Jade

I think pot should be legal. I don’t smoke it, but I like the smell of it.

Topics: Medical Marijuana, Smoke Weed, Cool Marijuana, Funny Marijuana, Funny Weed

Years later, I figured out why he (Ivan Karp) was such a successful art dealer-this may sound strange, but I believe it was because art was his second love. He seemed to love literature more, and he put the serious side of his nature into that...Some people are even better at their second love than their first, maybe because when they care too much, it freezes them, but knowing there's something they'd rather be doing gives them a certain freedom.

Topics: Love Literature, Caring Too Much

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.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Watching Television, Commercial Art, Television Watching, Assassination

When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.131, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Anachronism

Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still 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.

source: - "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again".

Topics: Drag Queen, Inspection

So many people have so many problems. When you think that health is wealth, you're so grateful just to be normal, more or less. Aren't you?

source: - "New Again: Shelley Duvall". Interview with Bob Colacello and Andy Warhol, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 1977.

Topics: So Grateful

I think video is the best market. When the cassette market comes out, if you just do movies that nobody else can do, that'll be the new way.

source: - Andy Warhol, Mark Francis, Mattjis Visser, Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2004). “Andy Warhol: the late work”, Prestel Publishing

Topics: Cassettes

I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don't know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone's vision to 20-20. That's an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren't for glasses.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.82, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Different Levels

What I've always wished I'd invented was paper underwear, even knowing that the idea never took off when they did come out with it. I still think it's a good idea, and I don't know why people resist it when they've accepted paper napkins and paper plates and paper curtains and paper towels-it would make more sense not to have to wash out underwear than not to have to wash out towels.

Topics: Paper Towels

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.

source: - Andy Warhol, Annette Michelson, B. H. D. Buchloh (2001). “Andy Warhol”, p.86, MIT Press

Topics: Coca Cola, Commercial Art, Poorest

I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody 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.

Topics: Empty Space, Commercial Art, Fine Artists, Artistry, Artists Minds

(You wouldn't believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair? especially if it matches the color of their curtains.

Topics: Electric Chair, Hang Ups

Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.

source: - Andy Warhol, Rainer Crone (1987). “Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the Artist”, Rizzoli International Publications

Topics: Commercial Art

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.

source: - Andy Warhol (2015). “America”, p.12, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Commercial Art

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

Topics: Commercial Art

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.

source: - Quoted in Free Press (Los Angeles), 17 Mar. 1967

Topics: Commercial Art

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Topics: Commercial Art

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

Topics: Commercial Art, Abstract Expressionism, Human Form

The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.

source: - Quoted in Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett POPism: The Warhol '60s (1980).

Topics: Pop Art, Shower Curtains

I’m really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts

Topics: Pop Art

Pop art is a way of liking things.

source: - Jane Dillenberger, Andy Warhol (1998). “The Religious Art of Andy Warhol”, Burns & Oates

Topics: Pop Art

Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star.

Topics: Pop Art

My ideal city would be one long main street with no cross streets or side streets to jam up traffic. Just a long one-way street.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.169, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Main Street

When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that's much more interesting in the long run.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.112, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Transmutation, Transmission

Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it's different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.85, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Petunias

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

source: - Eric Shanes, Andy Warhol (1991). “Warhol”, Gramercy Books

Topics: Deviation, Thinking Alike

I can't remember my dreams more than a couple of seconds after I wake up. It's frustrating because sometimes I dream that I'm watching a really good movie.

Topics: Really Good Movie

Reruns are my favorite things on TV.

source: - Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

Topics: Reruns

Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.

source: - Andy Warhol, Bob Colacello (1979). “Andy Warhol's exposures”

Topics: Funny Dating

After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn't work because they need the exercise and they've got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them even more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it's too much work. But if you have the time for it, and if you need that exercise-then you should do it.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.110, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Too Much Work, Having Sex

I love the English language just like I love all American things. But I confess that I don't feel confident using complex sentences or big words, hence my famous minimally expressive style - all the "gees" and laconic answers to interviewers. Most of all, I have developed listening as an art form.

Topics: Laconic

The childlike, gum-chewing naivete, the glamour rooted in despair, the self-admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones . . .

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Otherness, Naivete, Skin And Bones

I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.82, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Beautiful Face

I can never get over when you're on the beach how beautiful the sand looks and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

source: - Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Topics: Ruining It, Beautiful Art

I really like to work a lot. It makes time go by fast.

source: - Andy Warhol, Mark Francis, Mattjis Visser, Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2004). “Andy Warhol: the late work”, Prestel Publishing

Topics: Time Goes By

The teachers liked me. In grade school, they make you copy pictures from books. I think the first one was Robert Louis Stevenson.

source: - Andy Warhol, Mark Francis, Mattjis Visser, Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2004). “Andy Warhol: the late work”, Prestel Publishing

Topics: Grades In School

Every song has a memory; every song has the ability to make or break your heart, shut down the heart, and open the eyes. But I’m afraid if you look at a thing long enough; it loses all of its meaning

Topics: Make Or Break

I like church. It's empty when I go. I walk around. There are so many beautiful Catholic churches in New York.

source: - Andy Warhol, Mark Francis, Mattjis Visser, Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf, Germany), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2004). “Andy Warhol: the late work”, Prestel Publishing

Topics: Catholic Church

I've been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night... they'd just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it's so thrilling to go there. It really is.

Topics: Thrilling

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.

source: - Andy Warhol, Annette Michelson, B. H. D. Buchloh (2001). “Andy Warhol”, p.37, MIT Press

Topics: Brash

The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls--blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked--stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).

source: - Andy Warhol (1990). “POPism: The Warhol '60s”, Harvest Books

Topics: Nervous Breakdown

The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.

Topics: New Jersey

Wasting money puts you in a real party mood.