Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom’s richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at $384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended. These Damien Hirst quotes will motivate you.
Best Damien Hirst Quotes
- “I was taught to confront things you can’t avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you’re trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigor and energy. The fact that flowers don’t last for ever makes them beautiful.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Art comes from everywhere. It’s your response to your surroundings.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “It’s very easy to say, ‘I could have done that,’ after someone’s done it. But I did it. You didn’t. It didn’t exist until I did it.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “The idea is more important than the object.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and don’t believe in art, without questioning either.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds. Any artist’s big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that’s great.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I wanted a shark that’s big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I’ve found there aren’t any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There’s no better feeling. It’s beauteous. But it’s always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “As an artist you’re looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I’m striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they’ve swallowed a f… dictionary.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“When we are no longer children, we are already dead.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “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
- “It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “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
- “I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “To be an artist is not about fame; it’s about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn’t really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can’t be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Here’s one from me: ‘You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.’ If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“For me, art is always a kind of theater.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “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
- “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
- “You have to step over the boundaries sometimes just to find out where they are.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I realized that you couldn’t use the tools of yesterday to communicate today’s world. Basically, that was the big light that went on in my head.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“I think money is important for everyone because the lack of it is so painful.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I like the confusion you get between science and religion … that’s where belief lies and art as well.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “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
- “Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it’s such a big thing that you can’t.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it’s bad, it’s really simple.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “It’s ridiculous what I do. I can’t believe in it – but I have to.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“I love art. It is uplifting.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “As soon as something becomes art I think you get over the fear” ~ Damien Hirst
- “If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I’d go for the Pollock every time.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “When you’ve just done it, you’re not sure. But when you’ve sat with it for a couple of hours and you don’t want to do anything more to it, that’s a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you’re doing that anyway. However you intellectualize it, you still just live.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don’t think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“As an artist, you don’t stop making art because people are not buying it.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That’s as close as you can get to immortality.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you’re involved in that visual world, you can’t really go backwards.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “But I’m more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg’s my main influence.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they’re all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“Being best is a false goal, you have to measure success on your own terms.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it’s a poor substitute – you’re working for people not yet born – and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it’s their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I used to believe I was going to live forever. And then you suddenly become aware that you’re not.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “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 quotes
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“Sometimes when you’re drunk you can see better.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “In an artwork, you’re always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “It’d be nice to make lots of money but it’s quite difficult because every time I make lots of money I make a bigger piece that costs lots of money.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I don’t see what else you can spend your money on… If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“Never let money get in the way of an idea” ~ Damien Hirst
- “But I think it’s more that when you’re young, you’re invincible, you’re immortal – or at least you think you are. The possibilities are limitless, you’re inventing the future. Then you get older and suddenly you have a history. It’s fixed. You can’t change anything. I find that a bit disturbing, to be honest.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I’d write it down.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, It cant be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it. Thats kind of stuck with me.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “You’ve got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate.” ~ Damien Hirst
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“I don’t really have a career plan.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “Because it’s visual art, a lot of it comes from childhood experience but then a lot comes from the visual language – in advertising and stuff like that – which is around us.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “It’s such a crass idea – you’re either in love or out of love.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “The goal in life is to be solid, whereas the way that life works is totally fluid, so you can never actually achieve that goal.” ~ Damien Hirst
