Keith Haring Quotes

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

I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.

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

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

Touching people's lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.

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.

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.

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

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration).

People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

When I die there is nobody to take my place.

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

I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain.

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.

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.

Everybody draws when they are little.

Art has no meaning because it has many meanings, infinite meanings. Art is different for every individual, and is definable only by the given individual.

Keith Haring wrote " You see that's why I work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. Thats the reason also why, when people say. " Well you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is[laughter]" well, do you think that I have worked like that all those years and not be changed?" 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.

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

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.

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

Children know something that most people have forgotten.

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.

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.

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.

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.

The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.

Art is for everybody.

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