I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me. I don’t really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the 60s I never thought in terms of ‘love’ again.
After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex.
An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have, but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.
Art is what you can get away with.
As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that’s when I got what you might call a “following.” As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic.
Bad taste makes the day go by faster.
Beauty is a sign of intelligence.
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business in the most fascinating kind of art.
Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star.
Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.
Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details.
Employees make the best dates. You don’t have to pick them up and they’re always tax-deductible.
Everyone winds up kissing the wrong person goodnight.
Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Free countries are great, because you can actually sit in somebody else’s space for a while and pretend you’re a part of it.
I admit to having worn suede and leather pants myself for a while, but you just never feel clean, and it’s degenerate, anyway, to wear animal skins…. So I went back to bluejeans after my degenerate period.
I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.
I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.
I am a deeply superficial person.
I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.
I don’t see anything wrong with being alone, it feels great to me.
I had a lot of dates, but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.
I have been reading so much about China… The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong. It’s great. It looks like a silkscreen.
I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.
I like boring things.
I like to be the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place. Being the right thing in the wrong place and the wrong thing in the right place is worth it because something interesting always happens.
I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they’d say yes or no.
I never fall apart, because I never fall together.
I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.
I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment.’
I really don’t care that much about “Beauties.” What I really like are Talkers.
I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work’, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
I think someone should be able to do all my paintings for me.
I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell?
I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.
I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.
I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote.
I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.
I’d prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I’m asked. It’s not just that it’s part of my image not to tell everything, it’s just that I forget what I said the day before, and I have to make it all up over again.
If I had gone ahead and died ten years ago, I’d probably be a cult figure today.
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.
I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is ‘In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.
I’m not afraid to die; I just don’t want to be there when it happens
I’m the type who’d be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn’t going to. I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.
In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.
Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?
It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.
It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.
It’s the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, ‘In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’
I’ve decided something: commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.
I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty.
Land really is the best art.
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
Most people in America think Art is a man’s name.
My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person.
Of course what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: if I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.
Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
Our movies may have looked like home movies, but then our home wasn’t like anybody else’s.
People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.
People should fall in love with their eyes closed.
People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television – you don’t feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.
People’s fantasies are what give them problems. If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d just take whatever was there.
Pop art is a way of liking things.
Remember, they’ve never seen you before in their life.
Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.
Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they’ll just have to learn how to be babies longer.
Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what.
Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.
Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up-there and rich and living it up have something you don’t have, that their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you.
Success is what sells.
Success is when the checks don’t bounce.
The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.
The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting
The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.
The mystery was gone but the amazement was just starting.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself
What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted.
What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.
When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.
When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that’s much more interesting in the long run.
Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.
You meet rich people and you hang around with them, and one night they’ve had a few drinks and they say ‘I’ll buy it!’ Then they tell their friends, ‘You must have this person’s work, darling,’ and that’s all you need. That’s all it takes. Get it?’
