Top 33 James Rosenquist Quotes

We may seem insignificantly small, but we exist. So I remain optimistic.

There was one reviewer from the ‘New York Times,’ I forget his name, who said I was ‘death warmed over.’ I wrote him back that I knew more about death than he did. The ‘Times’ fired him, put him in the cooking department!

I travel a lot.

When I got my first loft, I still didn’t know what I was going to paint… There were long stretches when I just sat there and thought without interruption.

Warhol was questioning the capitalist society.

If a person is insane or troubled, you first have to get the person to admit that they have a problem before you can solve anything.

Nothing weighs on me. I don’t feel any weight.

I was on a panel with Marshall McLuhan in Canada. Someone says, ‘Mr. McLuhan, I read your book, and I disagree with you.’ And he says, ‘Oh, you read my book? Then you only know half the story.’

As a person gets older, time gets more interesting. As a kid, you waste so much of it.

Popular culture isn’t a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

The automobile crash was… devastating in ways that I still cannot really bear to think about… It took me many years to recover. In some ways, I never have.

I’m the one who gave steroids to Pop art.

It’s amazing how you meet people through other people. I knew a racecar driver, Stefan Johansson, who was very hot. He introduced me to Jean Todt. He introduced me to a French doctor. He introduced me to a French architect who redid the Louvre with I.M. Pei. He introduced me to Daniel Boulud.

I painted the Astor-Victoria sign seven times, and it’s 395 feet wide and 58 feet high. I dropped a gallon of purple paint on Seventh Avenue and 47th Street from 15 stories up and didn’t kill anybody. I dropped a brush at Columbus Circle. It fell on a guy’s camel-hair coat.

I don’t do anecdotes. I accumulate experiences.

The image is not important.

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they’re just not there to talk to. I can’t call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

I think of my actions every day: what seems to be important and what isn’t.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn’t have the content.

You live till you die, and that’s the end of it. What good is your legacy when you are dead? I worry about being alive, selling work, having fun, moving and doing things when I am alive.

I went to the University of Minnesota, and I met this amazing artist named Cameron Boothe there who was in World War I, who studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich.

The best thing about being an artist is the free clothing and getting to kiss pretty girls.

I learned a lot of painting tricks painting outside.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

I’m interested in contemporary vision – the flicker of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing! Bang!

I started billboard painting in Minneapolis, and I went to General Outdoor Advertising, and I said, ‘I could do that.’ They said, ‘Oh yeah… we can always use a good man around here.’

The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn’t work together. I didn’t meet Andy Warhol until 1964.

I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.

Certainly I have made comments on American society with the various pictures and have done about nine antiwar paintings. But I did them because I was incorporating my feelings into my work.

I used to know Madison Avenue advertisers. I didn’t like ’em. Bunch of jerks.

I feel lucky that I’ve been able to make a living from painting any idea that comes into my head.

I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a ‘nether-nether-land’: things that were a little out of style but hadn’t reached the point of nostalgia.

Many young artists, they look at the art world and think they can make a lot of money.