I’ve decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That’s all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.
I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.
Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I’ve noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.
The most interesting thing about artists is how they live.
My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.
What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.
This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life.
I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don’t do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.
I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.
Not all artists are Chess players, but all Chess players are artists.
It’s true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That’s the only reason for living, in fact.
Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.
The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.
The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.
I’m not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn’t the most important single idea to come out of my work.
I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.