Marcel Duchamp Quotes

“A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.”

“A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.”

“Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.”

“Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.”

“Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?”

“Art is all a matter of personality.”

“Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.”

“Can works be made which are not 'of art'?”

“Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.”

“From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.”

“Humor and laughter – not necessarily derogatory derision – are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously – for fear of dying of boredom.”

“I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist', as compared to 'believer'. And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.”

“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.”

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art – and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.”

“I came to feel an artist might use anything – a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol – t say what he wanted to say.”

“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.”

“I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.”

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

“I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.”

“I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a kind of constant euphoria.”

“I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.”

“I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.”

“I shy away from the word 'creation'. In the ordinary, social meaning of the word – well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.”

“I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me'.”

“If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved – bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.”

“In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.”

“In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.”

“It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way.”

“It's a product of two poles – there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.”

“Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.”