Edward Ruscha Quotes

I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I'm more disciplined today.

I used to change things in my early paintings to get the nuance or feeling I wanted, but now I plan everything in my head before I do it.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

Every time I write a song my approach changes.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

For the last three years, I've been working on 'Bromst,' and that's all that encompassed my brain. And now that it's out, it will change the way that I think musically.

Certain things you learn through exposure. It's really the elements which make up any artist. You really learn by example. You learn by influence. And some people have a huge impact on you, and that's how you become the artist you are.

I have been known as the minimal and conceptual artist for over five decades. I think I haven't changed much.

The public so often want to freeze the artist in a moment in time when they were at their peak, and they want the artist to revisit it over and over again as if it was something authentic.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

I'm still finding myself as an artist. I'm still experimenting a little bit.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

I myself believe that there is in every painter's life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.

It is much to my advantage that several of my pictures should be seen together, as it displays to advantage their varieties of conception and also of execution, and what they gain by the mellowing hand of time which should never be forced or anticipated. Thus my pictures when first coming forth have a comparative harshness which at the time acts to my disadvantage.

There are certain early plays of mine that I really don't like, but I can't imagine going back and fixing them. I would be totally incapable of it. I'm not in the head of the characters anymore.

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.

So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.

Me being able to be acting and doing other things has opened me as an artist, and I think even more from a visual standpoint.

I kind of like the way that I came up as an artist. I like experimenting.

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

I'm constantly learning as a songwriter, so naturally that makes you grow as an artist. But I also think the more time I spend in music the more time I feel I understand it; or at least I understand where I stand amongst the industry and my identity within it all.