Marcel Duchamp Quotes

56 quotes in 622 categories

• The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.
• All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.
• Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.
• Chess is a sport. A violent sport.
• Not all artists are Chess players, but all Chess players are artists
• The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly,…
• As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I…
• It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.
• To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.…
• Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world…
• I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it has been so discredited. So I want to get rid of it. There is an unnecessary…
• 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.
• Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.
• Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.
• Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my…
• 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…
• Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.
• I wanted to kill art for myself… …a new thought for that object.
• 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…
• No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.

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