It’s such a crass idea – you’re either in love or out of love.
The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they’re all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.
Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That’s as close as you can get to immortality...
Whenever I’ve been well-known or hitting the press, I’ve always had to get my credit card out to prove I’m Damien Hirst.
But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they’re taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it’s a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it’s unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.
Because it’s visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language – in advertising and stuff like that – which is around us.
Art comes from everywhere. It’s your response to your surroundings.
Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.
It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.
I’m 43. I’m not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet.
I think money is important for everyone, because the lack of it is so painful.
I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.
For me, art is always a kind of theater.
But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer’s always staring me in the face. I’m already doing it.
As a father, I would say I am more like a mother. I do a lot of hugging.
Artists are like everybody else.
In an artwork you’re always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.
A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.
Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that’s posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can’t take it any more is different.
I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.