“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”

People should fall in love with their eyes closed.

The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.

Success is when the checks don’t bounce.

But I always say, one’s company, two’s a crowd, and three’s a party

Pop art is about liking things.

I’ve never met a person I’ve couldn’t call a beauty.

When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.

A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.

Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good-night.

I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it.

If you’re not trying to be real, you don’t have to get it right. That’s art.

Fantasy love is much better than Reality Love.

Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don’t know whether I’m alive or whether I died. I wasn’t afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn’t feel fear. But I am afraid. I don’t understand why.

Art is what you can get away with.

And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.

I’ve been around long enough for people to know who I am and what my contributions are. They know me as more than just an artist. I think they know me as a woman as well.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

I’m not big on make up. I only have a make up artist for events.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet, because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you’re constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.