Roy Lichtenstein

“Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting.”

“I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.”

“When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.”

“I thought art was a sort of romantic life, or I don't know what I thought art was like. But I learned practically everything I know from Ohio State. And I'm really glad I went.”

“I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.”

“Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.”

“I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.”

“We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.”

“The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.”

“I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.”

“Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.”

“Something terrible can happen in my life, but I wouldn't put it in my art.”

“I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.”

“Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.”

“I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things.”

“I don't have big anxieties. I wish I did. I'd be much more interesting.”

“I think art was the one thing my high school didn't give. And I think that was probably one reason why I was interested in it.”

“But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.”

“I've never done an anguished painting.”

“I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.”