Charles Saatchi Quotes

My aim in life isn't so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit.

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.

My dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art.

I have never cared enough about money to worry about spending it, and have been fortunate to make enough to be spoiled rotten.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art. I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art.

I hate to sound like a romantic adolescent, but I believe artists don't generally see art as a career choice; they simply can't overcome their desire to make art, and will live on little income for as long as they have to, before they start to sell their work - or give up and get a paying job.

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.

Some people in the art world bemoan the hedge fund millionaires spending freely to acquire ostentatious displays of wealth and coolth for their giddily chic designer duplexes. Others bemoan art being treated as a commodity. But most of the bemoaning is because the art world is stuffed full of bemoaners, bemoaning about everything.

Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway.

When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.

Who's to say what will one day appear to have been trendsetting? Sometimes artists who receive breathless acclaim initially, seem to conk out. Other artists who don't register so keenly at the time, prove to be trailblazers.

I've heard that almost all the people crowding around the big art openings barely look at the work on display and are just there to hobnob. Nothing wrong with that, except that none of them ever come back to look at the art - but they will tell everyone, and actually believe, that they have seen the exhibition.

I have spent too long being able to manipulate the answers I want from market research to rely upon its findings any more than I do weather forecasts.

I don't like clothes shopping and trying on outfits in stuffy cubicles in men's shops, looking hideous in the wrap-round mirrors, is something I attempt as seldom as possible.

If, like me, you have many reasons to be less than secure and self-assured, and like me, you are far from stable even on your best days, don't for a moment imagine a psychotherapist will be of more help than a physiotherapist.

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

I may not be much good at most things, but if I didn't have the pleasure of planning and installing shows, and doing it better than anyone else, I would have stopped buying art many years ago.

I don't buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work.

If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.

When you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows - literally unforgettable because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

I primarily buy art to show it off.

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.

I have made so many mistakes, and such really stupid ones, I would start blubbing away if I could remember even half of them. But do not dwell on cock-ups, I say. You don't learn by your mistakes - at least I don't - so best to blunder on making fresh ones.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.