Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.

I am neither a writer nor a theorist. For a person who creates things to utter too many words means to regulate himself - a frightening prospect.

I just do what sounds good to me, and people seem to like it.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

When Picasso painted in Paris, was he a Spanish or a French painter? It does not matter, he was Picasso, whatever the influences surrounding him. He simply chose Paris because it was the ideal place for him to sell his creation.

Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I'm really drawn to.

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what's in style, what's current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise.

I never want to be in a position where I have to defend my material. It's too subjective. It's for other people to defend or not defend.

We wrote what sounded good to us and hoped it would find a home.

I don't want to have the bounds put on me in terms of mediums.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

You have to have a certain amount of limitations, I think, to make art and to make something that can be alive on film. Money can get in the way of that.

I think every artist reaches a place where they want to transcend genre.

I make films that are what they are. Some people like them, and some people don't.

I spent the first part of my career trying to avoid genre because I felt like genre, in some way, was cliche.

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to be at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself. I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way things that I had no words for.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

One may do whatever one likes. In art, the only thing is, to make sure that one does like it.

I don't want to go to a foreign country and get lumped into that genre. I'm just looking at the bigger picture. This K-pop title might be good for now, but looking ahead it could hold me back, like a prison of sort. I'm a little wary about that.

A lot of people thought I got famous as a studio artist, then decided to cash in on it. But it actually was just a matter of survival for many years, and I felt it was really important for me to be able to say whatever I wanted with my street art and fine art.