Keith Haring Quotes

“Art is nothing if you don’t reach every segment of the people.”

“Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed, and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.”

“Children know something that most people have forgotten.”

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.”

“Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it...”

“Everybody draws when they are little.”

“From the time I was little, things would happen that seemed like chance, but they always meant more, so I came to believe there was no such thing as chance. If you accept that there are no coincidences, you use whatever comes along.”

“How do you participate in the world but not loose your integrity?”

“I am a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end.”

“I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.”

“I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.”

“I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.”

“I was always totally amazed that the people I would meet while I was doing them were really, really concerned with what they meant. The first thing anyone asked me, no matter how old, no matter who they were, was, ‘What does it mean?’”

“I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything... and then make something...”

“I've always wanted to work for Walt Disney. That's what I thought I was going to do when I grew up.”

“If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.”

“My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.”

“Pure art exists only on the level of instant response to pure life.”

“Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well.... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.”

“See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.”

“Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.”

“The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.'”

“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint...”

“The dripping... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, its a natural part in the evolution of the work.”

“The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.”

“The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.”

“There are some images that I will only use once, and not use again because they don't seem to really hit the nail right on the head, but there are some which are so strong they have to be reduced; sometimes just reusing them makes them stronger.”

“There is nothing that makes me happier than making a child smile.”

“This transformation of ones self by ones own knowledge is, I think something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting.”

“Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don't do it for anyone else.”