Marcel Dzama Quotes

I'm constantly exposing myself to art and that inspires me.

I'm hoping that Abu Dhabi's first piece of street art will inspire the next generation of artists the same way that the discovery of subway art inspired me all those years ago.

I'm trying to steal from everybody. So yeah, there's cats that I'm personally affiliated with - Carl Franklin, Paul Thomas Anderson - and others that I don't know personally but their work I'm a big admirer of, like Martin Scorsese. But I'm hoping to come up with a language that is mine, that's specific to my take on this material.

As an artist, you take things from your environment, and there's going to be a style coming out of your environment.

Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

Robert Crumb is an influence on how I draw, but not on the subject matter I take or my approach. One thing I do like about Crumb is that he's chronicled his age, his times, and I think that is what artists should do.

I grew up with artists.

Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.

Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside.

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

My best efforts were some modern things that looked like very lousy Matisses. Thank God I had the sense to realize they were lousy, and leave Paris.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

Great art inspires great art.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

I was exposed to the arts, but there was no one in my family who was an artist.

I love Maira Kalman. She's an amazing illustrator and writer. I've loved her since I was in college, but when I moved to New York and experienced the same city she was drawing and writing about, I developed a whole new appreciation. Her work made me observe everything so much deeper and more joyfully.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

I'm not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

I see a lot of art; we see a lot of music, films at Sundance... that influences me and informs me more than theater just because I make a bigger effort to see other art forms.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.