Best Roy Lichtenstein Quotes & Sayings

You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard. — Roy Lichtenstein

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it. — Roy Lichtenstein

The things that I have apparently parodied I actually admire, — Roy Lichtenstein

Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this. — Roy Lichtenstein

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons. — Roy Lichtenstein

Outside is the world; it's there. Pop Art looks out into the world. — Roy Lichtenstein

Use the worst colour you can find in each place - it usually is the best. — Roy Lichtenstein

In America the biggest is the best. — Roy Lichtenstein

The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true. As long as the marks are related to one another, there is unity. Unity in the work itself depends on unity of the artist's vision. — Roy Lichtenstein

Pop Art is industrial painting. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won't be American; it will be universal. — Roy Lichtenstein

Painting stems from a sense of organisation, the sensed positions of contrasts. Not that it is about this. — Roy Lichtenstein

If Abstract Expression reached for the sublime, Pop turned ordinary imagery into icons. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol illuminated the transformative power of context and the process of reproduction. Claes Oldenburg's soft ice-cream cones and hamburgers changed sculpture from hard to soft, from stasis to transformation. — Arne Glimcher

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't. — Roy Lichtenstein

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled. — Jeff Koons

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity. — Roy Lichtenstein

I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way. — Roy Lichtenstein

I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it. — Roy Lichtenstein

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. — Roy Lichtenstein

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it. — Roy Lichtenstein

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes. — Roy Lichtenstein

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like. — Roy Lichtenstein

I take a cliche and try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial. — Roy Lichtenstein

Organized perception is what art is all about. — Roy Lichtenstein

I don't have big anxieties. I wish I did. I'd be much more interesting. — Roy Lichtenstein

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention. — Roy Lichtenstein

There must be something about art ... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that. — Roy Lichtenstein

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. — Roy Lichtenstein

Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit. — Roy Lichtenstein

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. — Roy Lichtenstein

I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. — Roy Lichtenstein

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence. — Roy Lichtenstein

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures. — Roy Lichtenstein

It was around this time that I'd begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people's minds. I'd figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn't know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I'd talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I'd talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I'd talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I'd talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument. — Ryu Murakami

My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world. — Roy Lichtenstein