Marcel Duchamp Quotes

I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.

I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.

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.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

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

I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.' Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on a canvas with a frame, they're called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer. We're all craftsmen, in civilian or military or artistic life.

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

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.

Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.

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

The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.

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.

You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.

I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.

What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it.

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

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.

One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning.

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.

My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.

The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.

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. (On giving up art to play chess)

I thought to discourage aesthetics ... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

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 wanted to kill art for myself ... ... a new thought for that object.

When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.

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?

You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.

I was poking fun at myself most of all.

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.

The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

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

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.

They're such supreme egos. It's disgusting. I've never seen anything worse than an artist as a mind. It is very low, uninteresting as far as the relationship of men is concerned.

André Breton was a lover of love in a world who believes in prostitution.

It's the viewer that makes the work.

Since I found that one could make a case shadow from a three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we are not familiar with.

Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately (forms of) expression... for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my (art) against such contamination.

I was highly attracted to chess for forty or forty-five years; then, little by little, my enthusiasm lessened.

In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.

I like living, breathing better than working ... my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

The life of a chess master is much more difficult than that of an artist - much more depressing. An artist knows that someday there'll be recognition and monetary reward, but for the chess master there is little public recognition and absolutely no hope of supporting himself by his endeavors. If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him - as if anyone could - but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.

This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life.

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see

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.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

Destruction is also creation.

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.

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

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.

Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.

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.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.

Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.

There is no solution, for there is no problem.

The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.

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.

Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.

When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.

It is the spectators who make the pictures.

One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it!

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.

You get my idea. Nothing of "artistic" literature about it, just straight medicine, a universal panacea, a fetish in a sense: if you have a toothache go to your dentist and ask him if he is Dada.

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.

One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination ... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.

I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do ...

I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.

The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time.

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.

My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game.

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

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

There is no solution because there is no problem.

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.