I always hear myself saying, ‘She’s a beauty!’ or ‘He’s a beauty!’ or ‘What a beauty!’ but I never know what I’m talking about.
My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat or in film’s case ‘run on’ manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.
My instinct about painting says, ‘if you don’t think about it, it’s right.’ As soon as you have to decide and choose, it’s wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets.
James Dean was the damaged but beautiful soul of our time.
Fantasy love is much better than Reality Love.
Exposure and attention make a work famous – the more you talk about it, the more attention it gets, the more validity it achieves.
Money has a certain kind of amnesty.
I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine.
I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: ‘What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!’ What does that mean?
Success is what sells.
I’m seeking out a new way to live and if it’s surfing, that’s the way I’ll do it. I’ll be a surfer for the rest of my life.
Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.
Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star.
Success is when the checks don’t bounce.
When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.
The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.
I don’t believe people die. They just go uptown. To Bloomingdales. They just take longer to get back.
Voyeurism is a director’s job description. It’s an artist’s, too.
Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.
Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody. Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? Andy Warhol: Yes, it’s liking things.