Edward Ruscha Quotes

My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.

I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that ... but that's what it did.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.

I'd read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: 'I want to be part of that.'

People refuse to believe that I've never been to Starbucks or Disneyland.

When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.

I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I'd been taught.

Work takes different forms. I can spend two or three days without completing anything, and it's choppy: it's filled with all kinds of irrationalities and stupid actions. I have some notion, and then I drop it because something else comes along. I'm forever darting from one side of the room to the other.

When I began painting, all my paintings were of words which were gutteral utterances like Smash, Boss, Eat. Those words were like flowers in a vase.

I wasn't captivated by the romance of Paris or London. I love visiting, but I'd rather be in L.A.

The one thing I miss is hitchhiking. Now there's no more of that. When's the last time you saw a hitchhiker? It's not that I consider it a great sport, but it was my way of seeing the country. The open road, especially in the western United States, is still very pristine, but everything else around it has changed.

I travel a lot, but I don't come away with new inspiration.

I don't watch TV, so I feel like I'm left out of the American fabric or something.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

I don't do social media of any kind. If I did, I may as well join Scientology.

Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets.

I knew I wanted to be some kind of artist from about 12. I met a neighbour who drew cartoons, and I had an idea I wanted to be a cartoonist - or something that involved Indian ink, at any rate.

I believe in intuition and approaching things as instant gratification. Just do the things you want to do, make the kind of pictures you want to make.

All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I've always had a weakness for heroic imagery.

The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.

Perhaps there would be more anxiety in my work if I lived in New York.

I just use [the camera]. I just pick it up like an axe when I've got to chop down a tree. I pick up a camera and go out and shoot the pictures I have to shoot.

When I first did the book on gasoline stations, people would look at it and say, Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this? In a sense, that's what I was after: I was after the head-scratching.