John Baldessari Quotes

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

You may find many contradictory statements and philosophies within my writings. However, to this I will say such is life, for life is full of contradictions.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.

That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.

I have an appetite for the normal in my life, as well as the abnormal.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Some people put up a peace sign with one hand. Some people put up the middle finger instead. I use two hands and put up both.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

My philosophy? Simplicity plus variety.

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

I am a man of contradictions, I suppose.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.

We are, all of us, incoherent text, and just knowing that - knowing that no matter how much you say, 'I am this' and part of you is not that - means that you can say it.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.