Words matter. These are the best Edward Ruscha Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Basically everything I’ve done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I’ll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.
I travel a lot, but I don’t come away with new inspiration.
I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I’ve grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn’t bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.
People refuse to believe that I’ve never been to Starbucks or Disneyland.
The one thing I miss is hitchhiking. Now there’s no more of that. When’s the last time you saw a hitchhiker? It’s not that I consider it a great sport, but it was my way of seeing the country. The open road, especially in the western United States, is still very pristine, but everything else around it has changed.
I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I’d been taught.
The big pay-off was to work as an artist and gain some shred of respect from your friends, who were also artists. But there was never any notion that you could make a living out of art. On the rare occasions you had a gallery show, and sold a little work, well, that was just gravy.
Work takes different forms. I can spend two or three days without completing anything, and it’s choppy: it’s filled with all kinds of irrationalities and stupid actions. I have some notion, and then I drop it because something else comes along. I’m forever darting from one side of the room to the other.
I’d read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: ‘I want to be part of that.’
The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.
I’m very stodgy. I’m always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I’m looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes – it’s all getting infilled.
All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I’ve always had a weakness for heroic imagery.
When you’re on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it’s very much like my paintings.
I have no social agenda with my work. I’m deadpan about it.
I wasn’t captivated by the romance of Paris or London. I love visiting, but I’d rather be in L.A.
