Top 35 Roy Lichtenstein Quotes

I’m excited about seeing things, and I’m interested in the way I think other people saw things.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it.

I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.

I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.

I think you go nuts when you get older.

I don’t think that my art isn’t serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I’m also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don’t think the subject is important.

Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him – or de Kooning or Still.

Everybody has called Pop Art ‘American’ painting, but it’s actually industrial painting.

You know, as you compose music, you’re just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

When I have used cartoon images, I’ve used them ironically to raise the question, ‘Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?’

I thought art was a sort of romantic life, or I don’t know what I thought art was like. But I learned practically everything I know from Ohio State. And I’m really glad I went.

I don’t have big anxieties. I wish I did. I’d be much more interesting.

I don’t think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

I think art was the one thing my high school didn’t give. And I think that was probably one reason why I was interested in it.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists – or I like the ones I like, anyway.

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.

I don’t think that I’m over his influence but they probably don’t look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

I’m interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it’s the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can’t be this way.

I’m trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

Picasso’s sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.

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.

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings – the abstract ones – as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn’t get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

My work isn’t about form. It’s about seeing.

I don’t know why you’d want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I’m always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We’re both saying something we want to be true.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

Something terrible can happen in my life, but I wouldn’t put it in my art.

Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don’t really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don’t think you could do this.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

I’ve never done an anguished painting.

I’m not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don’t really want it to carry one. I’m not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

The U.S. museums weren’t looking at my paintings at all – they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.