Latest Damien Hirst Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• You've really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you've just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.

  Damien Hirst

  Art, Thinking, Order

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.

  Damien Hirst

  Art, Way, Good Times

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things.

  Damien Hirst

  Order, People, Use

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I've always thought about it.

  Damien Hirst

  Thinking, Our Relationship, Feels

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• I've never learned to drive because I get lots of ideas when I'm a passenger in a car. I love to get in a car with a driver and just think and work things out.

  Damien Hirst

  Thinking, Ideas, Car

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• Death's just something that inspires me, not something that pulls me down. I used to get called morbid at school. I have always loved horror films; I like being frightened.

  Damien Hirst

  School, Inspire, Horror

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• I always try to make everyone mellow down, make sure everybody's happy. The people I have employed have always kind of stayed with us. A lot of people who come to work for you are artists in their own right. And they want to work for you because they want to pick something up.

  Damien Hirst

  Artist, People, Trying

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting. Like finding some imaginary computer painter, or a robot who paints.

  Damien Hirst

  Thinking, Robots, Kind

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• I quite like it to be risky. I'm not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I've arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in.

  Damien Hirst

  Art, Names, World

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.

• For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.

  Damien Hirst

  Art, Mean, Looks

  Interview with Anthony Haden-Guest, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 23, 2008.