Top 25 Roy Lichtenstein Quotes

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.

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.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

Everybody has called Pop Art ‘American’ painting, but it’s actually industrial painting.

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.

I’m trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

I’m excited about seeing things, and I’m interested in the way I think other people saw things.

In America the biggest is the best.

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.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists – or I like the ones I like, anyway.

Making something good and saying something brilliant are not two things. When you make your own statement, there is a higher energy level, and you do better painting.

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings – the abstract ones – as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn’t get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

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.

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.

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.

I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.

When I have used cartoon images, I’ve used them ironically to raise the question, ‘Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?’

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

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.

I don’t know why you’d want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I’m always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We’re both saying something we want to be true.

I don’t think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

I’ve never done an anguished painting.