1.
It's such a crass idea - you're either in love or out of love.
Damien Hirst
2.
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.
Damien Hirst
3.
I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either.
Damien Hirst
4.
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.
Damien Hirst
5.
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.
Damien Hirst
6.
I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.
Damien Hirst
7.
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.
Damien Hirst
8.
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.
Damien Hirst
9.
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
Damien Hirst
10.
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.
Damien Hirst
11.
I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.
Damien Hirst
12.
I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.
Damien Hirst
13.
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.
Damien Hirst
14.
I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.
Damien Hirst
15.
So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple.
Damien Hirst
16.
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.
Damien Hirst
17.
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.
Damien Hirst
18.
The idea is more important than the object.
Damien Hirst
19.
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.
Damien Hirst
20.
Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings.
Damien Hirst
21.
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.
Damien Hirst
22.
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.
Damien Hirst
23.
I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.
Damien Hirst
24.
I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.
Damien Hirst
25.
I think money is important for everyone, because the lack of it is so painful.
Damien Hirst
26.
It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.
Damien Hirst
27.
Being best is a false goal, you have to measure success on your own terms.
Damien Hirst
28.
I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.
Damien Hirst
29.
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.
Damien Hirst
30.
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.
Damien Hirst
31.
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.
Damien Hirst
32.
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.
Damien Hirst
33.
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.
Damien Hirst
34.
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.
Damien Hirst
35.
I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.
Damien Hirst
36.
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.
Damien Hirst
37.
It's ridiculous what I do. I can't believe in it - but I have to.
Damien Hirst
38.
Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.
Damien Hirst
39.
Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you're involved in that visual world, you can't really go backwards.
Damien Hirst
40.
As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it.
Damien Hirst
41.
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.
Damien Hirst
42.
The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.
Damien Hirst
43.
I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.
Damien Hirst
44.
If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time.
Damien Hirst
45.
When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
Damien Hirst
46.
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.
Damien Hirst
47.
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.
Damien Hirst
48.
Artists are like everybody else.
Damien Hirst
49.
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.
Damien Hirst
50.
But then architects don't build their own houses.
Damien Hirst
