Roy Lichtenstein

“In America the biggest is the best.”

“I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.”

“I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way.”

“I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.”

“Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.”

“Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.”

“I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?”

“My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.”

“I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.”

“When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.”

“Picasso's sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.”

“The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.”

“When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'”

“But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.”

“I think you go nuts when you get older.”

“There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.”

“You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.”

“I wasn't sure pop art or my work would last more than six months.”

“Making something good and saying something brilliant are not two things. When you make your own statement, there is a higher energy level, and you do better painting.”

“I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.”