David Salle Quotes

#1. As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.

David Salle

#2. This is a little off subject, but I'm interested in those cases where someone is barking up the wrong tree, or misapplying their talent.

David Salle

#3. For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

David Salle

#4. Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted a lot of time not being bold enough, or still engaged in the questioning that you get into at school.

David Salle

#5. Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.

David Salle

#6. People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent.

David Salle

#7. I'm happiest when I feel that several almost opposing sensations are present at the same time.

David Salle

#8. I remember making a videotape in a fancy hair salon in Beverly Hills. The soundtrack in the salon had a whole worldview behind it - I was interested in things like that.

David Salle

#9. It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.

David Salle

#10. My focus was always toward imagery of some sort.

David Salle

#11. Since I moved six or seven times the first year I was in New York, I had to be able to roll up the work, and paper would just get destroyed. Once I looked at what I'd done, I realized I had made a painting, sort of by default.

David Salle

#12. To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke.

David Salle

#13. What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.

David Salle

#14. Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often the time when it looks like anything but.

David Salle

#15. I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.

David Salle

#16. The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.

David Salle

#17. Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.

David Salle

#18. The only thing worth doing is what's never been done before.

David Salle

#19. I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.

David Salle

#20. Spend a day talking only in rhyme.

David Salle

#21. If my work is pornography, so what? I don't have any moral compunction about pornography. Any feelings I have about it are purely stylistic ... I don't see why it should be excluded as a serious subject.

David Salle

#22. My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World War II, but he was always a Sunday painter. At a certain point, he gave me his oil paints and I messed around with them, having no idea what I was doing.

David Salle

#23. I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.

David Salle