David Shrigley Quotes

I'm never really that worried about doing something a little different, 'cause it always just seems to fit into what I want to do.

I like comedy but I guess I don't think [my art] is that funny, either. It's too dark and a bit weird in places to be genuinely, uniformly hilarious and function as comedy.

I'm not pretending to be somebody who's got really limited craft skills. I just am a person who's got really limited craft skills.

I'm definitely not an outsider artist. I'm very much an insider artist. I get written about in art magazines, and I'm not, like, in a mental institution. I'm a regular guy who went to art school.

I never sat down and decided to make work about life and death. It just all comes out of my head like water pouring out of a jug.

I guess I must just be obsessed with death. Apparently you think about it a lot more as you get older. Maybe you could chart how when I was in my 20s I talked about sex all the time, and in my 40s it's just death.

I don't like theorizing about my work myself, but that's not to say I have no interest in theory. Other people are free to say what they want about my work.

If the work jells a little bit in terms of being placed in the oeuvre, I don't care - as long as it works.

I don't think I've ever made any conscious decision to be a comic artist, but to me there's something quite anarchic about comedy.

I think circumstance plays a big part in terms of what I do. For example, if I wasn't ever able to show in an art gallery I probably wouldn't really make very much sculpture. But I've had the opportunity to show in big spaces, so I want to fill up that space in the same way you might want to fill up a page.

I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy.

The camera is an eye that sees and records the lives of filthy people. Its pictures are hung in museums and published in thick books that future generations can see how horrible life was.

The work, I suppose, is made in the editing, whereby I make literally hundreds of drawings, and then a much smaller percentage of those become the finished work.

I feel quite comfortable and happy with making a work that looks like it could have been made by somebody else.

I guess I just always want to surprise myself and say something that I'm not really quite sure where it came from, and it sort of makes sense and has a kind of profundity to it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

I think people are quite surprised that the handwriting I use in my drawings and paintings is my own handwriting. They're slightly shocked when I write them a letter.

I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I've spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.

I don't draw every day. I tend to draw intensely during certain periods of time. I draw to amuse myself on occasion, when I am bored and drawing is the only fun to be had.

Making drawings with text in the first place, it really was born of a desire to be economic, and to do things as simply as possible, and to do as much as I could by the most economic means.

I don't really want to tell jokes about trivia; I'd kind of rather tell jokes about things like life and death.

Sometimes commercial galleries ask for particular work to sell, but I try not to be bossed around by them. I didn't become an artist to get bossed around.

I think the thing is there's a work for every space, you always have to respond to a context, whether it be a physical context, or a political one, or a cultural one, whatever.

I like making books but I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing. Perhaps I just try to arrange a bunch of seemingly random drawings into something that makes a vague narrative sense. Sometimes it sort of makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.

I don't want to just spend my life ridiculing something that I find ridiculous, although there is an element of satire in my work.