Keith Haring Quotes

#1. Through my friend Tony Shafrazi, who's an art dealer and an artist himself - he helped to show Basquiat and Keith Haring, and has worked with the Francis Bacon estate - it was really through my friendship with Tony that I developed even more of an interest in art.

Owen Wilson

#2. Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.

Robert Hughes

#3. I met Keith Haring at SVA college where he was having an art show, later we had a group art show at the Mud Club in NYC. Keith owed me $50, so he gave me a large framed canvas with barking dogs that had large dicks. I painted over Keith's painting to paint flowers for my mom's living room.

Steve Kaufman

#4. Obviously there was Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe, but Howard was on the brink of becoming a famous director - it didn't happen because he died.

Aaron Brookner

#5. I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.

Keith Haring

#6. When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

Keith Haring

#7. The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.

Keith Haring

#8. Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don't do it for anyone else.

Keith Haring

#9. Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.

Keith Haring

#10. You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people ... that doesn't make you better than somebody who has no money but is sympathetic and genuinely loving to fellow human beings.

Keith Haring

#11. The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.

Keith Haring

#12. I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

Keith Haring

#13. Art is for everybody.

Keith Haring

#14. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

Keith Haring

#15. When I die there is nobody to take my place.

Keith Haring

#16. Nothing is important ... so everything is important.

Keith Haring

#17. Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

Keith Haring

#18. If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

Keith Haring

#19. There are some images that I will only use once, and not use again because they don't seem to really hit the nail right on the head, but there are some which are so strong they have to be reduced; sometimes just reusing them makes them stronger.

Keith Haring

#20. I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything ... and then make something ...

Keith Haring

#21. I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.

Keith Haring

#22. The public has a right to art ... Art is for everybody,

Keith Haring

#23. The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint ...

Keith Haring

#24. The dripping ... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it's a natural part in the evolution of the work.

Keith Haring

#25. Everybody draws when they are little.

Keith Haring

#26. I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

Keith Haring

#27. People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

Keith Haring

#28. Children know something that most people have forgotten.

Keith Haring

#29. See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

Keith Haring

#30. The act of creation is a kind of ritual. The origins of art and human existence lie hidden in this mystery of creation. Human creativity reaffirms and mystifies the power of 'life.

Keith Haring

#31. My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.

Keith Haring

#32. Pure art exists only on the level of instant response to pure life

Keith Haring

#33. I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.

Keith Haring

#34. Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well ... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.

Keith Haring

#35. 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

#36. Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form. Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed, and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.

Keith Haring

#37. Art is nothing if you don't reach every segment of the people.

Keith Haring

#38. Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

Keith Haring

#39. I've always wanted to work for Walt Disney. That's what I thought I was going to do when I grew up.

Keith Haring

#40. Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it ...

Keith Haring