Harvey Fierstein Quotes

I love Andy Warhol!

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.

I don't think he'd [Andy Warhol] be that amazed because he was so driven to be the Picasso of the second half of the 20th century.

I could write an entirely new book about Andy Warhol, but I don't think I will. I certainly don't think Nancy Reagan would like that, as she's been patiently waiting for Volume 2 of my chronicle of the life of her and Ronnie.

Andy [Warhol] put on his fey kind of act, but he wanted to be number one and he succeeded. But you never know. Fifty years from now he might not be seen as so important, but the way our whole culture has gone, and the way it continues to go, is his way - for better or for worse.

I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.

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.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

When I was 17, I met many artists, and it started to become this conversation with artists out of which all of my exhibitions grew.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

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.

Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol.

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.

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

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

It is interesting the way you create something and send it out into the culture, and then the culture kind of goes berserk.

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.

When I started working at Pictures On Walls, I'd been hanging out with Banksy for a few years travelling around the world together painting stuff, and then we moved into a new office and wanted to do screenprinting.