Top 100 Quotes About Banksy
#1. And we were Banksy on an overpass in New Orleans spray-painting porch lights on the hurricane. We were welcome mats for the un-forgiven. We never sold our windpipes to make a living. We were the letters sent to the wrong address, but opened anyway. We opened anyway.
Andrea Gibson
#2. I am unable to comment on who may or may not be Banksy, but anyone described as being 'good at drawing' doesn't sound like Banksy to me.
Banksy
#4. Banksy is a poet, but so was hitler.
Atticus
#5. It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.
Paul Beatty
#6. I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.
Moby
#7. What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work.
Boris Johnson
#8. I think Banksy is a very cool artist, and I respect his social messages.
Kim Rossmo
#9. I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don't like it, you can paint over it!
Banksy
#10. I don't think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it,
Banksy
#11. Today's art has been cancelled due to police activity.
Banksy
#12. People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.
Banksy
#13. As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.
Banksy
#14. Not everyone will understand your journey. That's okay. You're here to live your life, not to make everyone understand.
Banksy
#15. Stencils are good for two reasons; one - they're quick; two - they annoy idiots
Banksy
#16. We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves,
Banksy
#17. The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.
Banksy
#18. A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.
Banksy
#19. Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realise that reciting red indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet.
Banksy
#20. I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in - like peace and justice and freedom.
Banksy
#21. I wouldn't want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities.
Banksy
#22. I don't believe in anything. I'm just here for the violence.
Banksy
#23. When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.
Banksy
#24. If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn't matter how great you were, it'll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.
Banksy
#25. The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.
Banksy
#26. Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.
Banksy
#27. You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.
You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation
at high speed with total clarity.
Banksy
#28. If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.
Banksy
#29. One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.
Banksy
#30. I used to tell everyone I met to be an artist ... I don't do that any more.
Banksy
#31. I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.
Banksy
#32. I've never really understood why people sleep. Wasting a third of your life and becoming vulnerable for almost 8 hours every night. Doesn't seem very appealing to me.
Banksy
#33. Fight the fighters, not their wars.
Banksy
#34. Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.
Banksy
#35. People either love me or they hate me, or they don't really care.
Banksy
#36. It doesn't take much to be a successful artist-all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.
Banksy
#37. Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers,
Banksy
#38. Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.
Banksy
#39. Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot
Banksy
#40. Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'
affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.
Banksy
#41. Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?
Banksy
#42. All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared
to learn to draw?
Banksy
#43. I could sit in a pub and tell you all the things that are written in this book but you wouldn't fucking listen.
Banksy
#44. I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.
Banksy
#45. Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.
Banksy
#46. I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.
Banksy
#47. Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.
Banksy
#48. Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.
Banksy
#49. I have no interest in ever coming out. I'm just trying to make the pictures look good; I'm not into trying to make myself look good. And besides, it's a pretty safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a couple of 15-year-old kids out there.
Banksy
#50. It's a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.
Banksy
#51. The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it'll be paraded round Sotheby's by people wearing white gloves.
Banksy
#52. If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they'd be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.
Banksy
#53. There's obviously nothing wrong with selling your art - only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it's confusing to know how far you should take it.
Banksy
#54. When he time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss.
Banksy
#55. Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.
Banksy
#56. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.
Banksy
#57. I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.
Banksy
#58. People seem to think if they dress like a revolutionary they don't actually have to behave like one.
Banksy
#59. People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do. We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it's more like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a country without an army.
Banksy
#60. I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's clever it's an
anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.
Banksy
#61. Think from outside the box, collapse the box and take a fucking knife to it.
Banksy
#62. I've learnt from experience that a painting isn't finished when you put down your brush - that's when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.
Banksy
#63. People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish ... but that's only if it's done properly.
Banksy
#64. If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to
wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.
Banksy
#65. There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover - Metropolitan Police Spokesperson
Banksy
#66. You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
Banksy
#67. You don't need planning permission to build castles in the sky
Banksy
#68. Live as a villain, die as a hero
Banksy
#69. All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.
Banksy
#70. Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.
Banksy
#71. I give away thousands of paintings for free.
Banksy
#72. I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don't do that so much anymore.
Banksy
#73. If at first you don't succeed, Call an airstrike.
Banksy
#74. The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.
Banksy
#75. All I know about what people think of my gear is what a couple of my friends tell me, and one of them always wants to borrow money, so I'm not sure how reliable he is.
Banksy
#76. Nobody ever listened to me until they didn't know who I was.
Banksy
#77. But there's no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We're not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it's hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.
Banksy
#78. If you get tired learn to rest, not to quit.
Banksy
#79. At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.
Banksy
#80. We don't need any more heroes; we just need someone to take out the recycling.
Banksy
#81. Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.
Banksy
#82. There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge.
Banksy
#83. People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one
Banksy
#84. In the future, everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes.
Banksy
#85. I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
Banksy
#86. Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own.
Banksy
#87. Keep your coins, I want change.
Banksy
#88. T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.
Banksy
#89. Be positive, patient and persistent.
Banksy
#90. You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
Banksy
#91. I sucked a lot of breasts to get where I am today.
Banksy
#92. A wall is a very big weapon. It's one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.
Banksy
#93. I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies.
Banksy
#94. If it doesn't matter, get rid of it.
If you can't get rid of it, it matters.
Banksy
#95. If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day.
Banksy
#96. I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.
Banksy
#97. You're advised not to drink the replica Arab spring water.
Banksy
#98. Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it's actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.
Banksy
#99. The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.
Banksy
#100. It's great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.
Banksy
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