“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.”

In the future, everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes.

We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.

I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.

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

People seem to think if they dress like a revolutionary they don`t actually have to behave like one.

I don’t know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.

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.

You’re mind is working at its best when you’re being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.

Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s okay. You’re here to live your life, not to make everyone understand.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own.

People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

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

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.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

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.

… we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation….

When they saw you kneeling, crying words you mean. Opening their eyeballs, eyeballs, pretending that your Al Green, Al Green.

I define “grindin'” as just nonstop work! Nonstop work, nonstop progress. Can’t sleep during that grind – I mean, you get a little bit of it, but if you’re progressin’ at every hour, every second, you are grindin’.

To a woman–I mean, a nice woman–there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.

Keep focused on the substantive issues. To make a decision means having to go through one door and closing all others.

Moving away from “useful” doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.

The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty.

The need of the hour is that your life should be revolutionised.