90+ Damien Hirst Quotes On Art, Artwork And Way To Work

Damien Hirst is a British artist who is best known for his controversial artwork. He is considered to be one of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists movement, which emerged in the late 1980s. His work often makes use of shock tactics, such as displaying dead animals in formaldehyde, to challenge viewers to confront the fragility of life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Damien Hirst on art, love, artwork.

Top 10 Damien Hirst Quotes

1. I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.
2. You've really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you've just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.
3. So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple.
4. I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.
5. I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.
6. The idea is more important than the object.
7. Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings.
8. I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don't like contemporary art.
9. I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.
10. But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live.

Damien Hirst Short Quotes

• Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.
• I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.
• If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time.
• Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.
• But I could never make a judgement that something was obscene.
• You can always tell a great painting, because when you get close there are all these nervous marks.
• What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.
• You have to step over the boundaries sometimes just to find out where theyare.
• I always ignore money.
• You've got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate.

Damien Hirst Quotes About Art

Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality. — Damien Hirst

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down. — Damien Hirst

Because it's visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language - in advertising and stuff like that - which is around us. — Damien Hirst

For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight. — Damien Hirst

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work. — Damien Hirst

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things. — Damien Hirst

Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It's not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it's sensational art... It's like touching skin. — Damien Hirst

As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it. — Damien Hirst

I don't see what else you can spend your money on... If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet. — Damien Hirst

I love art. It is uplifting. — Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst Quotes About Love

I've never learned to drive because I get lots of ideas when I'm a passenger in a car. I love to get in a car with a driver and just think and work things out. — Damien Hirst

Death's just something that inspires me, not something that pulls me down. I used to get called morbid at school. I have always loved horror films; I like being frightened. — Damien Hirst

I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz. — Damien Hirst

It's such a crass idea - you're either in love or out of love. — Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst Quotes About Live

Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that's posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can't take it any more is different. — Damien Hirst

The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. — Damien Hirst

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful. — Damien Hirst

But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer's always staring me in the face. I'm already doing it. — Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst Quotes About People

As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f... dictionary. — Damien Hirst

But I'm more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg's my main influence. — Damien Hirst

You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things. — Damien Hirst

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud. — Damien Hirst

I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either. — Damien Hirst

I always try to make everyone mellow down, make sure everybody's happy. The people I have employed have always kind of stayed with us. A lot of people who come to work for you are artists in their own right. And they want to work for you because they want to pick something up. — Damien Hirst

A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything because I was spending a lot of time socialising and going out, but I've always managed to get work actually done. — Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst Famous Quotes And Sayings

Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free. — Damien Hirst

The goal in life is to be solid, whereas the way that life works is totally fluid, so you can never actually achieve that goal. — Damien Hirst

I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems. — Damien Hirst

I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting. Like finding some imaginary computer painter, or a robot who paints. — Damien Hirst

Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you're involved in that visual world, you can't really go backwards. — Damien Hirst

The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas. — Damien Hirst

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death. — Damien Hirst

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever. — Damien Hirst

I did a butterfly show in Berlin, and we had a guy who's an expert on butterflies; who bred them all and who looks after them all in the space. — Damien Hirst

But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they're taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it's a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it's unacceptable, and I like that contradiction. — Damien Hirst

But for me, from my point of view, I don't mind if it falls over... if you break the glass you replace the glass, if the sheep falls out you can always get a new sheep. — Damien Hirst

When you've just done it, you're not sure. But when you've sat with it for a couple of hours and you don't want to do anything more to it, that's a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet. — Damien Hirst

It's good to have a title that's not just one word. If you're gonna title it, you might as well try and say something. — Damien Hirst

I don't really have a career plan. — Damien Hirst

I don't think I'd want my pet in formaldehyde, but I guess in America they would. — Damien Hirst

It's ridiculous what I do. I can't believe in it - but I have to. — Damien Hirst

I think I like big issues, but I don't believe in God or religion. — Damien Hirst

There's always something you missed or something you didn't notice or somehow you got wrong... I don't really have a beginning. — Damien Hirst

Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't. — Damien Hirst

My Mum brought me up to believe that if you look after the pennies then the pounds look after themselves, and I could never do it. — Damien Hirst

It'd be nice to make lots of money but it's quite difficult, because every time I make lots of money I make a bigger piece that costs lots of money. — Damien Hirst

I liked The Beatles a lot when I was growing up. — Damien Hirst

I made one untitled piece. — Damien Hirst

As soon as something becomes art I think you get over the fear — Damien Hirst

The infinite possibilities. That's what used to do my nut in. — Damien Hirst

There's no possible way you can get what you want. — Damien Hirst

When we are no longer children, we are already dead. — Damien Hirst

But then architects don't build their own houses. — Damien Hirst

I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage. — Damien Hirst

I wanted a shark that's big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it. — Damien Hirst

I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I've found there aren't any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me. — Damien Hirst

I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in. — Damien Hirst

I just do what everybody asks me to do, in terms of media and stuff. — Damien Hirst

I just hope that I can be kind of like the Beatles. I really like that kind of model. I like the way that without losing integrity they could change through fashion and not look back at the '60s and vomit when they saw what they'd done. — Damien Hirst

It's very easy to say, 'I could have done that,' after someone's done it. But I did it. You didn't. It didn't exist until I did it. — Damien Hirst

I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this. — Damien Hirst

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel. — Damien Hirst

For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic. — Damien Hirst

Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, It cant be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it. Thats kind of stuck with me. — Damien Hirst

I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well. — Damien Hirst

I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. — Damien Hirst

In fact, the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking. — Damien Hirst

I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it. — Damien Hirst

Never let money get in the way of an idea — Damien Hirst

Artists are like everybody else. — Damien Hirst

Life Lessons by Damien Hirst

1. Damien Hirst's work emphasizes the idea of mortality and how it affects our lives, showing us that life is fleeting and that we should make the most of it.
2. His work often incorporates elements such as animals preserved in formaldehyde, which serves as a reminder of our own mortality and the importance of living life to the fullest.
3. His works also often contain a sense of beauty and wonder, reminding us to appreciate the beauty in life and to take time to appreciate it.