My Graffiti Quotes & Sayings

My mom is a painter, so I've been doing drawings and paintings as early as I can remember. Then there was this gap where I was doing graffiti in high school and making as much [traditional] art. — Alec Monopoly

I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall. — Cath Crowley

It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there. — Pat Conroy

I started when I was 15 years old. And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world, I was doing graffiti - writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. — JR

Marina Orlova was hooked on my quote about women not owing men. I scrolled through her posted paintings and recalled a Slovak friend once commenting on a guy wanna-be a great painter, something like this: "Aaano, on bol profesionalnym maljiarom na Slovensku, maloval tam pice a hakove krize po stenach". He meant graffiti, but I hesitate to translate it in detail for it may sound too rough. Another thought is about surreal, sometimes spurious aesthetics mixed with hinted or daring sexuality, which Marina Orlova endorses, deliberately or not, in line of her claimed profession. The posts call to mind The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or even Titus Andronicus. No wonder, thousands of bozos are attracted to her internet activity because ... , well, the woman is hot. — Vinko Vrbanic

The trick with hip-hop-hip-hop is a sport. The only music that's really, really close to a sport. It starts off, "My DJ's better than yours. I can out-rap you, I can out-dance you, my graffiti piece is better than you." It's very competitive. — Ice-T

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work. — Keith Haring

His face is more open than an open book, like a wall of graffiti really. I realize I'm writing wow on my thigh with my finger, decide I better open my mouth and snap us out of this impromptu staring contest. — Jandy Nelson

I read the graffiti written on the walls of my brain. Then I use my writing to give it voice so it won't simply be "whispered in the sounds of silence." (Apologies to Paul Simon) — Dick Peterson

Do not try to be pretty. You weren't meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just "pretty.""
- Things I Wish My Mother Had Taught Me — Suzanne Rivard

I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places. — Swizz Beatz

'American Graffiti' stayed in my mind, but I don't think to this day I've done a film that captured that same level of melancholy. It was so well done. Talking about it has given me the idea I might try harder to make that melancholy film! — Jean Reno

Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse. — Frederick Buechner

American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn't happy with that idea. I'd always had pretty long hair back then - in college, particularly - so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie. — Harrison Ford

Your dad was in a street gang? My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement — Chuck Palahniuk

I was a banker in Morocco when I first saw 'American Graffiti.' It was before I was an actor, a melancholy time in my life, and this mood was reflected in the film. — Jean Reno

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action. — Thomm Quackenbush

As a matter of fact, that was a bit of a problem for me at the beginning of my career - the problem of identification. In The Conversation I played a character who was gay, so nobody recognised me from American Graffiti. When I did Apocalypse Now, after Star Wars, I played an intelligence officer of the American army. George Lucas saw the footage I had done and didn't recognise me until halfway through the scene. — Harrison Ford

I was here but now I'm gone
I left my name to carry on
Those who liked me
Liked me well
Those who didn't can go to hell'"
-The bathroom wall — E.M. Crane

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer. — Robert Montgomery

Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn't want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks. — David Sedaris

I watched a lot of movies about teenagers, including 'The Last Picture Show,' 'American Graffiti,' 'Rumblefish.' It's one of my favorite genres. — Gia Coppola

For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse. — Richard Phillips

Couldn't you see me and you stretched out in a bikini on the beach in Tahiti?
See, me, I'm very selective even though I could be greedy;
My main objective is to write our names together in graffiti. — Pharoahe Monch

When I take my old copies of the phenomenologies of religion down from the shelf and thumb through their pages, I feel as if I were walking through the halls of abandoned buildings. My graduate school notes lie heavy in the margins, like scrawls of graffiti on the walls, attesting to the fact that human once contested these spaces. I wonder, each time I close one of these volumes and put it back on the shelf, whether the puff of dust that arises from its binding is not a reminder that systems are built to crumble, and the grander the system, the more spectacular the fall. — Malcom David Eckel

WE
When it is over, we breathe and ache like old oak, like peeling birch. One of Our lost souls set free. We move, a chess piece in a dark room, cast-iron legs moving a centimeter at a time, crying out in silent carved graffiti. Calling to Our next victim, Our next savior. We carve on Our face:
Touch me.
Save my soul. — Lisa McMann

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up ... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses ... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet ... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans. — Rob Brezsny

I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly here in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it - the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elevation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between there and here. — Siri Hustvedt

Hip-hop is a competition culture. It's based around, "My DJ is better than you. My graffiti artist is better than you." — Ice-T

Did you even realize who was at that table?" The one with long, dark, wavy hair laughs. "I mean, let's just for a minute acknowledge that you just sang to two of the members from Corrosive Velocity and Jackson Shaw! Like, from The Forgotten, Jackson Shaw."
"Sid, keep it down." The other hisses so low, I'm almost unable to hear her.
Realizing this is my snake charmer, I slip into autopilot with the gathering fans: nod, smile, and sign.
"You've got to be more excited. I mean, the man is seven feet of lickable body graffiti. Whew! I'd climb his beanstalk any day. — Sadie Grubor

My lawyer's opinion is that the cops might not actually be able to charge me with criminal damage any more - because theoretically my graffiti actually increases the value of property rather than decreasing it. That's his theory, but then my lawyer also believes wearing novelty cartoon ties is a good look. — Banksy

I had just been doing graffiti around New York and this real estate investor guy had walked through meat packing in New York and saw some of my graffiti. He was impressed and asked if I sold canvases. I really had not made any canvases of my graffiti work yet, but told him I could make one for him. He then commissioned me to make ten paintings and put on my first art show. Between the sold out show and the cops chasing after me it created a lot of media and I've been doing really well since then. — Alec Monopoly

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there. — Paloma Picasso

My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser. — Mike Mills

In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted. — Rabih Alameddine