Damien Hirst Quotes

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

Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that's posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can't take it any more is different.

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.

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful.

As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f... dictionary.

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.

Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.

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

So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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 did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems.

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.

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.

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.

I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.

I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting. Like finding some imaginary computer painter, or a robot who paints.

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

Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person. It's kind of a Warhol thing.

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.

I just hope that I can be kind of like the Beatles. I really like that kind of model. I like the way that without losing integrity they could change through fashion and not look back at the '60s and vomit when they saw what they'd done.

But then architects don't build their own houses.