Marcel Duchamp

“Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.”

“I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.”

“There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening.”

“Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.”

“I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.”

“The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.”

“For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.”

“'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.”

“Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.”

“In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.”

“What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it.”

“Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom.”

“My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.”

“Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it.”

“The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.”

“I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'”

“What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.”

“Can works be made which are not 'of art'?”