Damien Hirst Quotes

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.

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.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

I always think that in some way, art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It's like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.