Damien Hirst Quotes - Page 3

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

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.

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.

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

As soon as something becomes art I think you get over the fear

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

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.

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.

Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, It cant be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it. Thats kind of stuck with me.

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.

I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage.

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

I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.

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 think I like big issues, but I don't believe in God or religion.

For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.

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

It'd be nice to make lots of money but it's quite difficult, because every time I make lots of money I make a bigger piece that costs lots of money.

Artists are like everybody else.

But I think it's more that when you're young, you're invincible, you're immortal - or at least you think you are. The possibilities are limitless, you're inventing the future. Then you get older and suddenly you have a history. It's fixed. You can't change anything. I find that a bit disturbing, to be honest.

Whenever I've been well-known or hitting the press, I've always had to get my credit card out to prove I'm Damien Hirst.

I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in.

I'm 43. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet.

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

I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.