Damien Hirst Quotes (42 Quotes)

We have had some animal rights things but they all get the facts wrong so they have to go away looking a bit stupid.

To me it's like, this is the kind of world I live in and these are all the people who are artists who are doing what I'm doing, but in their own way.

In fact, the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking.

So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-level art, twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

There's no possible way you can get what you want.

It's good to have a title that's not just one word. If you're gonna title it, you might as well try and say something.

There's always something you missed or something you didn't notice or somehow you got wrong... I don't really have a beginning.

Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.

I did a butterfly show in Berlin, and we had a guy who's an expert on butterflies who bred them all and who looks after them all in the space.

I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.

But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live.

But I'm more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg's my main influence.

But I'm not ambitious for myself, or for attention.

I think it's just, I really enjoy art, and I just hope that when people come and see the exhibition, I want them to be just grabbed and thrown around a bit by visual things.

Because it's visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language - in advertising and stuff like that - which is around us.

Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.

A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything because I was spending a lot of time socialising and going out, but I've always managed to get work actually done.

There's a lot of things that people don't like, I think it'd be difficult for anyone to go in and say they didn't like the whole thing, because it's enjoyable, it's like a funfair, I hope.

It'd be nice to make lots of money but it's quite difficult, because every time I make lots of money I make a bigger piece that costs lots of money.

But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer's always staring me in the face. I'm already doing it.

It's such a crass idea - you're either in love or out of love.

I have titles floating around in my head I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage.

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.

But I could never make a judgement that something was obscene.

I made one untitled piece.

The goal in life is to be solid, whereas the way that life works is totally fluid, so you can never actually achieve that goal.

I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.

And I think, you know, I like it, so I can't understand it, I think if you're gonna have this stuff going in your ears, you might as well have some stuff going in your eyes.

I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.

I just do what everybody asks me to do, in terms of media and stuff.

Artists are like everybody else.

My Mum brought me up to believe that if you look after the pennies then the pounds look after themselves, and I could never do it.

I've seen things that are 200 years old, in formaldehyde.

I thought it might be nice to have a little line on the side going, just in case, of doing famous people's pets for them, in formaldehyde.

Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that's posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can't take it any more is different.

I have a Californian girlfriend and she's into a lot of Californian bands so I listen to that.

I don't really have a career plan.

I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.

Whereas if you suddenly go, OK, I choose to die now, you take the matter into your own hands.

I always ignore money.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.