Damien Hirst Quotes

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

Artifice is art.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.

When I make a picture, I make love.

Designis a revelation to me. It's like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the 'Paris Review' and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I think if you're good and you can persuade people you're going to be able to do that role and ultimately the audience buys it, then it doesn't matter whether you were really a chimpanzee in disguise! You've done it.

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

Picture-taking is an ensemble art - like theater.

In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

I was never attracted to being a very proficient singer or player. I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way I was very drawn to tension within cinema.

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

What I do is create images, period.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.

Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.