Top 100 Quotes About Graffiti
#1. 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
#2. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#3. None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for 'Indiana Jones.' Nobody in their right mind thought 'American Graffiti' or 'Star Wars' would work.
George Lucas
#4. I did an art show for Donald Trump at his house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a bunch of pop art and stuff like that, so I wasn't doing any graffiti at that time, so I'd say from about 2000 to 2006, I wasn't doing any graffiti.
Alec Monopoly
#5. Ariel Pink never really existed because he was always Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, but then people started doing interviews with Ariel Pink as if Ariel Pink existed.
Ariel Pink
#6. The city fought a $300 million, 18-year war on graffiti. New York Mayor John Lindsay declared war in 1972, and the battle for the transit system came later.
Adam Mansbach
#7. On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.
Paul Goldberger
#8. I have always been a Peter Blake fan and love street art and graffiti. I really like this street-art collective called Faile. They're from Brooklyn and make these prints of beautiful women.
Eliza Doolittle
#9. I started when I was 15 years old. And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world, I was doing graffiti - writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure.
JR
#11. Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.
Gloria Steinem
#12. His achievements read like the graffiti on the walls of a hangman's changing room.
Jonathan Larson
#13. Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.
Rudy Giuliani
#14. Hip-hop is a competition culture. It's based around, "My DJ is better than you. My graffiti artist is better than you."
Ice-T
#15. Take two paintings by the same artist, one has a signature and the other doesn't. The signed picture is generally more valuable. The signature is almost graffiti or a tagging system, yet it can become more important than the subject.
Gavin Turk
#16. The walls were covered with graffiti and William passed the time correcting the spelling
Terry Pratchett
#17. One piece of graffiti doesn't mean much. Forty pieces of graffiti might mean something ... It's all about connecting the dots.
Kim Rossmo
#18. He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn't this passage too short? No, it wasn't a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him - then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER.
Ramsey Campbell
#19. Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.
Frederick Buechner
#20. I wanna spray this fucking wall with cum graffiti.
Kendall Grey
#21. Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: Yids, go back to Palestine, so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: Yids, get out of Palestine.
Amos Oz
#22. Couldn't you see me and you stretched out in a bikini on the beach in Tahiti?
See, me, I'm very selective even though I could be greedy;
My main objective is to write our names together in graffiti.
Pharoahe Monch
#23. When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.
Bill Jay
#24. When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone's graffiti.
Wayne LaPierre
#25. [Graffiti] gets erased and painted over, and maybe it's even more beautiful because we know it won't last.
Wendy Lichtman
#26. Everybody's trying to leave their mark on the world. That's why there's graffiti and babies.
Kristen Schaal
#27. spattering the walls with pulp and guano, like graffiti artists.
Henri Cole
#28. I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.
Olivier Megaton
#29. The comment section of the internet is like gang graffiti, it makes no sense and is ugly to look at.
Michael P. Naughton
#30. The trick with hip-hop-hip-hop is a sport. The only music that's really, really close to a sport. It starts off, "My DJ's better than yours. I can out-rap you, I can out-dance you, my graffiti piece is better than you." It's very competitive.
Ice-T
#31. a piece of graffiti scrawled on a Brazilian train read: "Those who petition for divorce use the ink of their children's tears".
Anonymous
#32. I got arrested for graffiti. I got arrested - a lot of, like, underage drinking, drunk in public, shoplifting, you know, your various, like, suburban arrests, I guess.
James Franco
#33. The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said.
Mary Karr
#34. Our children will be told what Israel has done.' graffiti on the Wall in Bethlehem, opposite Aida refugee camp, 2008
William Parry
#35. For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse.
Richard Phillips
#36. I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places.
Swizz Beatz
#37. There was a great jagged hole where they had ripped out the fireplace; the wall around it was crowded with faded graffiti explain who loved who, who was gay and who should fuck off.
Tana French
#38. The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace.
Barry McGee
#39. Swearing, drunkenness, "haunting bad houses," fighting, and drawing graffiti - hugh penises were a favourite - on the palace walls were all punishable by warnings,
Alison Weir
#40. For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.
Adam Mansbach
#41. Graffiti, citizens, is the name for the way capitalists deface their public buildings.
Adam Johnson
#42. Graffiti writers will never stop. They'll just evolve. It's interesting what ideas people come up with and how it all extends forward.
Ben Eine
#43. There's never any graffiti in the hotel. Although in the Gents a couple of weeks ago I did see someone had drawn a lady's part. Quite detailed. The guy obviously had talent.
Steve Coogan
#44. Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for being naughty or aggressive.
Cy Twombly
#46. 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
#47. Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it was easy.
Neil Gaiman
#48. Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain: Carrie White eats shit.
Stephen King
#49. Enjoy the war,' read the graffiti left on Berlin's walls. 'The peace will be terrible.
Andrei Cherny
#50. He refuses to sell his paintings and writes "NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says.
Jennifer Clement
#51. In fact, if you look at the root word of phonograph it just means phonetics of graphology, phono-graph, writing with sound, so graphology. You know graffiti, same root word.
DJ Spooky
#53. Comment sections on the internet is like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like nonsense and it's ugly to look at.
Michael P. Naughton
#54. Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers,
Banksy
#55. Do not try to be pretty. You weren't meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just "pretty.""
- Things I Wish My Mother Had Taught Me
Suzanne Rivard
#56. 'American Graffiti' was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.
George Lucas
#57. And I look at him because he needs to be looked at. He needs to be seen. I hate that he has been on his own for so long painting graffiti moons in the dark keeping quiet about who he really is.
Cath Crowley
#58. His face is more open than an open book, like a wall of graffiti really. I realize I'm writing wow on my thigh with my finger, decide I better open my mouth and snap us out of this impromptu staring contest.
Jandy Nelson
#59. I wasn't trying to turn graffiti into an art form. I just wanted to learn about art. I wanted to learn this game.
Barry McGee
#60. Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.
A.C. Grayling
#61. Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.
Cy Twombly
#62. I know about hip-hop culture, whether it's graffiti writing or DJ-ing or being an MC.
Josh Peck
#63. A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Jaron Lanier
#64. 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
#65. After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.
Jeffrey Deitch
#66. Maybe I should add some graffiti to spice it up. For a good time call the Consort. Beast Lord eats your food and turns into a lion in his sleep. Mahon has hemorrhoids. Boudas do it better. Warning, paranoid attack jaguar on the prowl ...
Ilona Andrews
#67. Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.
Brad Holland
#68. I read the graffiti written on the walls of my brain. Then I use my writing to give it voice so it won't simply be "whispered in the sounds of silence." (Apologies to Paul Simon)
Dick Peterson
#69. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from gray-colored chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-size chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti.
Liane Moriarty
#70. Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.
Banksy
#71. No matter how the official narrative of this turns out," it seemed to Heidi, "these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.
Thomas Pynchon
#72. Graffiti is like building a career. And there is a dialogue with the other artists out there mostly fellow writers because a lot of people who don't paint just see a blur when they look at it.
KAWS
#73. Though Kurt would later claim that his graffiti messages were political, in fact, most of what he wrote was nonsensical. He enraged a neighbor with a boat by painting "Boat Ack" in red letters on the ship's hull; on the other side he lettered, "Boat people go home.
Charles R. Cross
#74. 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
#75. Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.
Jeffrey Deitch
#76. Love is like graffiti on the train,
Meaning love isn't easy to explain
Tonedeff
#78. I got into DJing and making beats when I was about 17. I was always fascinated by the four elements of hip-hop: you know, writing, rhyming, breakdancing and graffiti.
Abbie Cornish
#79. Don't you think it's sad some people are only remembered by the graffiti about them on the bathroom stalls?
Cole Gibsen
#80. I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.
Sally Brampton
#81. Do not try to be pretty. You were not meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just 'pretty'.
Anonymous
#82. I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.
Adam Mansbach
#83. 'American Graffiti' stayed in my mind, but I don't think to this day I've done a film that captured that same level of melancholy. It was so well done. Talking about it has given me the idea I might try harder to make that melancholy film!
Jean Reno
#84. Some people are enraged, and some people are applauding. If there were a mission statement for graffiti, that would be it.
Barry McGee
#85. Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.
Mia Kirshner
#86. I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.
Mick Ebeling
#87. A society gets the graffiti it deserves,' commented one criminologist on the street galleries that grew ever scruffier.
Asne Seierstad
#88. Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It's part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.
Adam Mansbach
#89. Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.
Jeffrey Deitch
#90. I used to breakdance, be a b-boy. I love hip-hop from back in the graffiti days, growing up listening to Michael Jackson. Loved it from birth. I know it all, from Afrika Bambaataa, the roots and the beginning. I came up in a good era.
DJ Khaled
#91. HIP-HOP HAS DIFFERENT ELEMENTS DEALING WITH MUSIC, RAP, GRAFFITI ART, B-BOYS (WHAT YOU CALL BREAK BOYS) ... AND ALSO DEALING WITH CULTURE, AND A WHOLE MOVEMENT DEALING WITH WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING, AS WELL AS PEACE UNITY AND FUN.
Afrika Bambaataa
#92. For me, graffiti means making marks on surfaces using just about anything, be it markers, spray, paint, chalk, lipstick, varnish, ink. Or it can be the result of scratches and incisions. The aim is to maintain the energy created by disturbance or excitement in the street.
Barry McGee
#93. People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish ... but that's only if it's done properly.
Banksy
#94. Rhyme written in graffiti xeroxed on blueprints, students influenced are now a nuisance.
Louis Eric Barrier
#95. In Afghanistan I was doing street art because it was more open, but when I had a show, only men would come. I said, I'm an artist not only for men, but for women too. So that's why I like graffiti.
Malina Suliman
#96. It's strange with graffiti. You put a lot out, but you don't get that much back because not many people know who's doing it. You have your peers of about 10 guys who know you are the one painting.
KAWS
#97. Environmental damage such as graffiti, fly-posting and general littering is a menace that is becoming all too prevalent, not just in inner cities but in many communities - urban and rural.
Margaret Beckett
#98. Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
Adam Mansbach
#99. This goes out to freedom fighters, graffiti writers, innocent lifers, grassroots organizers
Talib Kweli
#100. I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.
Paloma Picasso
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