Warhol Quotes

I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.

I'd been asked by Takashi Murakami to collaborate on something, which was an honor for me. I was really pleased. And then he had me as a guest speaker on his radio show, and we were talking about art. I don't think he knew I was interested in the topic - he was really surprised to find out that I own some original Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter and Jean-Michel Basquiat works. So, in some ways, I think he simply wanted to see what I have.

My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.

So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely... Warhol.

I've collected Andy Warhol art for years now I have two portraits of myself done by Steve Kaufman.

I was at Plaza Athénée, where a jacket and tie was required. Andy Warhol came with his turtleneck, because he was always wearing a turtleneck, with a tie over it, and we gave him a jacket - so he had a jacket and tie over the turtleneck. It was pretty cool.

There was no way I could write a paper knowing that Andy Warhol and Boy George were partying at Danceteria.

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.

Whether you think you like Rubens or not, his influence runs through the pathways of painting. Like Warhol, he changed the game of art.

That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

I've withdrawn many times. Part of me is a monk, and part a performing flea! The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not at Xenon with Andy Warhol.

The only thing that shocks me is public interest in people who shouldn't be interesting at all, like Jade Goody. We've gone past Andy Warhol and all those clever, arty and witty things that were done and said in the sixties...the fifteen minutes, and so on. Now your celebrities don't have to do anything, they're just voted in. And that shocks me.

Andy [Warhol] put on his fey kind of act, but he wanted to be number one and he succeeded. But you never know. Fifty years from now he might not be seen as so important, but the way our whole culture has gone, and the way it continues to go, is his way - for better or for worse.

What I did suffer when I was young was because I was sort of a hick coming into New York City. I was made fun of by a lot of the Factory people. Even Andy Warhol thought I was a hick.

Money is completely boring to me. It means nothing, except it feeds my art. Every penny I make goes back into the Haus of GaGa. My Haus of GaGa is something like Andy Warhol's Factory.

I never heard my mom say, "Not now, I'm busy." But I did have extraordinary experiences that I'm very aware were extraordinary. I mean, I traveled Europe before I was 12 years old, had been to the White House numerous times. Andy Warhol photographed me; Michael Jackson called our house.

His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times...and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire.

Every time I work with Dr. Luke I learn something new. He's kind of like the Andy Warhol of pop music, where he mass produces his art but it always still has heart and always still has an emotional thread to it. I think he's really a genius and I'm so lucky to have gotten to work with him.

Hey, Cunningham - Andy Warhol called. You're at 14:55 and we're tickin' big-time here, Chachi.

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

You know what Andy Warhol's sole contribution to this country has been? He made Campbell's Soup a household word.

I was working in the gap where Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted communism and Warhol appropriated the protest image and named it riot, which is precisely what King didn't want his cause to be associated with. But that was the very thing that made it sexy to the art world. So I played between the two associations.

Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

After Andy Warhol died, it left a dark cloud over N.Y.C. nightlife.

I could write an entirely new book about Andy Warhol, but I don't think I will. I certainly don't think Nancy Reagan would like that, as she's been patiently waiting for Volume 2 of my chronicle of the life of her and Ronnie.

I think Chelsea Girls is a complete masterpiece and I think Andy's [Warhol] films are equally as good as the art. I think one day they will be considered equal. They aren't yet. They will be.

When I was with Andy Warhol, I thought, 'God, his wig looks cheaper than mine!'

Edward Smith: What do you think is the characteristic of a really nice person? Some people you obviously do like more than others. Andy Warhol: Ummm, well, if they talk a lot. ES: What, and don't make you talk? AW: Yeah, yes, that's a really nice person.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

He was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the...he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him.

He [Andy warhol] went out every evening to five or six parties with a tape recorder in one pocket and a camera with extra film and batteries in the other pocket, constantly recording and photographing everyone he came across.

As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.

Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end.  If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied.  For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.

When I went to college, and I went to art school, I started to realize that Warhol was cool and that pop art was fun.

I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were.

In the '50s, to appropriate was a real no-no. However, once you go from Duchamp to Jasper Johns to Warhol, appropriation becomes not only a common thing to do, but possibly the central way of working in the era we call postmodernism.

There was an exchange between me and Andy Warhol. We met, we liked each other, we appreciated each other. He would come to us for Easter in Marrakech. In September we would meet up in Venice. And every time I went to New York I would spend some time with him at the Factory, where we would have dinner together. He's a man that I admired deeply. He shook up the notion of painting - not as much as Marcel Duchamp had done, but he was part of the same general movement. And then we both admired art deco.

I feel when you walk into somebody's apartment on Fifth Avenue or house in Malibu and you see a Basquiat, a Warhol, a Richard Prince, you say to yourself, '$700,000, $2.2 million, $350,000...' To me that is completely uninteresting. I'd rather go to a house where there's great art and I have no idea who the work is by.

I met Andy Warhol in the '60s, a wonderful time, with wonderful people. There was Fred Hughes, and Jed Johnson, who I liked a lot. Jed Johnson decorated my apartment in New York, at the Pierre. It was his first job.

Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods.

Somehow Annie Flanders from the SoHo News heard I was doing pictures and was headed to Paris. She saw my worked, liked it, and asked me to take pictures for her paper while I was there, but told me I would first have to buy a real camera - 35-millimeter. I got a little book that taught me how to load film. I read it on the flight to Paris. Hours later, I found myself at the top of the Eiffel Tower with Yves Saint Laurent and Andy Warhol. It's all been downhill since then.

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.

Warhol was a prime example of a schizoid person. Maybe he had Asperger's, or maybe he was just an amorous human being on earth.

Like Andy Warhol and unlike God Almighty, Larry King does not presume to judge; all celebrities are equal in his eyes, saints and sinners alike sharing the same 'Love Boat' voyage into the dark beyond, a former sitcom star as deserving of pious send-off as Princess Diana.

I'm attracted to the work of younger artists, and it's affordable compared to mature art, so you can take a chance much easier on a younger artist. I can't say that I've found an artist who I think is going to be the next Bacon or Warhol. You shouldn't have to do that really. You go forward, and you find something new.

I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that.

I was a fan of Andy's since I was a small kid. I recall seeing an ad of famous people on an airplane together. It was caricature drawing. There was Muhammad Ali, there was Miles Davis, and there was Andy Warhol. I had a fascination with him since I was little.