Andy Warhol quotes: “Drella’s” mind-bending soundbites.
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best 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.”
“I want to die with my blue jeans on.”
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
“But I always say, ‘One’s company, two’s a crowd, and three’s a party.'”
“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.'”
“Everyone needs a fantasy.”
“It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.”
“Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains – daisy chains – of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between ‘his,’ ‘her,’ or ‘their’ wish and yours.”
“If everyone isn’t beautiful, then no one is.”
“The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.”
“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”
“I’ll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody.”
“I like boring things.”
“My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat – or in film’s case, ‘run on’ – manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.”
“In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”
“I’ve decided something: commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market, it really stinks.”
“Employees make the best dates. You don’t have to pick them up and they’re always tax-deductible.”
“Beauty is a sign of intelligence.”
“I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”
“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.”
“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.”
“I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.”
“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”
“If you’re not trying to be real, you don’t have to get it right. That’s art.”
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke. Liz Taylor drinks Coke. And just think… you can drink Coke, too.”
“I am a deeply superficial person.”
“Voyeurism is a director’s job description. It’s an artist’s, too.”
“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.”
“I think everybody should like everybody.”
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
“My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person.”
“Checks aren’t money.”
“Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.”
“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.”
“I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike.”
“I like to be the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place. Being the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place is worth it because something interesting always happens.”
“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.”
“Art is what you can get away with.”
“An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have.”
“I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something.”
“Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.”
“If you wear a wig, everybody notices. But if you then dye the wig, people notice the dye.”
“I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.”
“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.”
“I like to work when I’m not working – do something that may not be considered work, but to me it’s work. Getting exercise by going to the grocery store.”
“I’m not afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
“Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil – of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape-record them. But I didn’t think of myself as evil – just realistic.”
“Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”
“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.”
“As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it.”
“I never fall apart, because I never fall together.”
“People sometimes say the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal.”
“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.”
“Security breeds stagnation.”
“The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.”
“When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.”
“The nicer I am, the more people think I’m lying.”
“You have to be willing to get happy about nothing.”
“Kiss me with your eyes.”
“There are beautiful sounds in rock. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just dig the noise, and you’ve got your sound. We’re musical primitives.”
“It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.”
“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’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses its meaning.”
“Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.”
“People should fall in love with their eyes closed.”
“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.”
“Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don’t know whether I’m alive or whether I died. I wasn’t afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn’t feel fear. But I am afraid. I don’t understand why.”
“Fantasy love is much better than reality love.”
“The world fascinates me.”
Related: Pablo Picasso quotes.
