Richard Prince Quotations

Making art has never been a mystery to me. It's never been something that's very difficult.

I don't collect books just because other people collect them, and I'm not going to have books in my collection if I think it's badly written.

My studio is the only place I feel good in. There, I'm fearless; outside, I'm a mess.

Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone's work, I think to myself, 'Gee, I wish I had done that.'

Some people are better at handling the limelight than others.

It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes.

In a way, I pattern myself after all the bands I used to like as a kid. Every time they put out LPs, they had a whole new look and a new sound.

A lot of it's experimental, spontaneous. It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.

What I find is that the taking, the stealing, the appropriation of images has to do with prior availability, and it sets up a degree where things can be shared... It's like 50% off... You can let something of another emotion or another personality sign on your work, or co-sign it.

I wish I had met [Francesca] Woodman forty years ago. It would have been great to live with her for a year. She didn't save anything. She played the camera like a new guitar. She murdered herself out taking pictures...

It would be strange for me to think I'm being ripped off, because that's what I do!

I wouldn't mind people saying, "You can't do this because this isn't enough."

The subject comes first, the medium second.

Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing.

I got a job in the tear-sheets department, ripping up magazines like People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time, and delivering the editorial pages.... So I began to use a camera to make fake photographs of the ads. By re-photographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange.

The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.

We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.

I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.