Marcel Duchamp

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.”

“It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.”

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.”

“A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.”

“I like living, breathing better than working…my art is that of living.”

“Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.”

“Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?”

“I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.”

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.”

“The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, is the king of the universe.”

“I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug.”

“My art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral.”

“The danger is in pleasing an immediate public; the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for a public that will come fifty years, a hundred years after your death.”