Marcel Duchamp

“I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.”

“In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.”

“Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.”

“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.”

“There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.”

“I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a kind of constant euphoria.”

“When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.”

“In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.”

“I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.”

“Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.”

“One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning.”

“Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.”

“I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.”

“There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.”

“I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.”

“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.”

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

“In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.”

“I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?”

“Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.”