William Klein Quotes

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I love Damien Hirst. I respect his work a great deal, and I am happy that the polka dots I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everybody joining hands to use them in this way.

Mr. Koons's work has always inspired architects, which I think is very interesting. I think he is an artist who has reinvented himself so many times and reinvented so many different series.

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

The days of the painter at the Bauhaus appear to be truly over. They are estranged from the actual core of present activities, and their influence is more restricting than inspiring.

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

Even Andy Warhol had a copy of '666.'

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.

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

He [Andy Warhol] engaged people and I think all of that is what helped keep him keyed in to the times beyond all of the celebrity stuff that was going on around him. He was much more like a fan than a celebrity himself.

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

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

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

I hate artists who are not of their time.

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.

I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.

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.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Art challenges technology, but technology inspires the art.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.