Damien Hirst Quotes
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I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage.
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Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.
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You've really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you've just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.
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There's always something you missed or something you didn't notice or somehow you got wrong... I don't really have a beginning.
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When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
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I just hope that I can be kind of like the Beatles. I really like that kind of model. I like the way that without losing integrity they could change through fashion and not look back at the '60s and vomit when they saw what they'd done.
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I always feel a bit trapped when a painting goes for millions of pounds and only one person can have it. If you can have that as well as a poster on every student's wall, then you're in a very enviable position. I'd like to do a Damien Hirst for £500 at some point.
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As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it.
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Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.
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Artists are like everybody else.
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But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live.
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It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.
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In fact, the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking.
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I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.
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I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either.
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Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.
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When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person. It's kind of a Warhol thing.
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Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, It cant be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it. Thats kind of stuck with me.
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The goal in life is to be solid, whereas the way that life works is totally fluid, so you can never actually achieve that goal.
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I liked The Beatles a lot when I was growing up.
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A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.
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What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.
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Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you're involved in that visual world, you can't really go backwards.
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Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.
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I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.
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I've never learned to drive because I get lots of ideas when I'm a passenger in a car. I love to get in a car with a driver and just think and work things out.
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To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.
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I don't really have a career plan.
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I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds. Any artist's big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that's great.
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Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.
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