David Salle

What most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go…

— David Salle

I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you…

— David Salle

Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted…

— David Salle

I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism…

— David Salle

Since I moved six or seven times the first year I was in New York, I had to be able to roll…

— David Salle

People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a…

— David Salle

I feel like all the American artists are aesthetically not very interesting and mired in a complaining relationship to its own culture,…

— David Salle

I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's…

— David Salle

There are so many different ways to talk and think about art. We just spoke about when attitude becomes form. But when…

— David Salle

I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was…

— David Salle

If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass?…

— David Salle

I was actually dumbfounded by how some artists talked to each other. For example, it was a normal night at a bar,…

— David Salle

What if everything in a museum is crap? It's entirely possible; it's not the end of the world.

— David Salle

“good art illustrates anything at all, it’s likely to be a story you didn’t even know needed telling.”

— David Salle

“How a painter treats this edge is the real subject of realist painting; how the brush behaves in the vicinity of an…

— David Salle

Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often…

— David Salle

Spend a day talking only in rhyme.

— David Salle

Really it becomes a question of architecture. How do you move people through a space and allow them to have an experience?…

— David Salle

Why should it be difficult for someone to claim their personal reaction, especially in this time where we are only too happy…

— David Salle

I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview…

— David Salle

People talk about this often in the art world. The press releases have reached a level of absurdity and creativity - creative…

— David Salle

I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20…

— David Salle

What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position…

— David Salle

My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World…

— David Salle

It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the…

— David Salle