Donald Judd Quotes

The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.

Sometimes when you're writing a song and that song comes into your head, it definitely comes from somewhere, like a real experience.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

When you get to readin' about where the music and John Steinbeck and all those people like that come from, the further you go the more interesting it becomes.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

The body, in 'La Belle Noiseuse,' was the source of the artist's creativity.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

I'm not talking about Russia in my music. I've never been to Russia. I'm not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China. I'm talking about me being American and growing up in a crazy world and helping to reflect all different sides of life.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.

I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.

I start listening to something, or I'm seeing somebody a lot or seeing their art. And then I just really want to make a picture of them.

When I draw a character, very often as I'm doing a face, my face mirrors the expression.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.