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I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.

Banksy

People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do. We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it’s more like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a country without an army.
BANKSY

Army Country Military
It’s impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won’t. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I’d picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn’t like the attention.
BANKSY

Car New Orleans Two
T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.
BANKSY

Photography Progress Theatre
If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.
BANKSY

Art Lying People
I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don’t like it, you can paint over it!
BANKSY

Look Over Paint World
If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you’ve made your own sculpture.
BANKSY

Cities Past School
I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.
BANKSY

Art Need Order
Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.
BANKSY

Art House People
A wall is a very big weapon. It’s one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.
BANKSY

Art Graffiti Wall
I don’t think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it.
BANKSY

Graffiti Should Have Thinking
The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it’ll be paraded round Sotheby’s by people wearing white gloves.
BANKSY

Looks People White
If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.
BANKSY

Alive Live Painting Today
Keep your coins, I want change.
BANKSY

Coin Keep Want
The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace – never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.
BANKSY

Art Home Taken
It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist-all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.
BANKSY

Artist Needs Successful
Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot
BANKSY

Believe Punishment Should
If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn’t matter how great you were, it’ll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.
BANKSY

Climbing Drunk Skills
I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.
BANKSY

Art Book Mean
But there’s no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it’s hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.
BANKSY

Artist Self Views
The grumpier you are, the more assholes you meet.
BANKSY

Graffiti Negative People
Gaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open air prison’ because no-one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons – they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day.
BANKSY

Air Cutting Drinking
If you don’t own a train company then you go and paint on one instead… it all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something… that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.
BANKSY

Citiy Name School
There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge.
BANKSY

Art Revenge Sex
Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.
BANKSY

Art Bus Stops Museums
The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires
BANKSY

Art People Real
I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.
BANKSY

Art Book Mean
Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.
BANKSY

Graffiti Hipster Speak

I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.

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I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.

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