Top 90 Damien Hirst Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love art. It is uplifting.”

— Damien Hirst

2. “So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it’s bad, it’s really simple.”

— Damien Hirst

3. “I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life.”

— Damien Hirst

4. “I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.”

— Damien Hirst

5. “Never let money get in the way of an idea.”

— Damien Hirst

6. “Being best is a false goal, you have to measure success on your own terms.”

— Damien Hirst

7. “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

8. “The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.”

— Damien Hirst

9. “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 intellectualise it, you still just live.”

— Damien Hirst

10. “I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.”

— Damien Hirst

11. “Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.”

— Damien Hirst

12. “It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.”

— Damien Hirst

13. “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

14. “When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person. It’s kind of a Warhol thing.”

— Damien Hirst

15. “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it.”

— Damien Hirst

16. “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say “f off”. But after a while you can get away with things.”

— Damien Hirst

17. “I think money is important for everyone, because the lack of it is so painful.”

— Damien Hirst

18. “Great art – or good art – is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don’t think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.”

— Damien Hirst

19. “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

20. “But then architects don’t build their own houses.”

— Damien Hirst

21. “Sometimes when you’re drunk you can see better.”

— Damien Hirst

22. “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

23. “I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing.”

— Damien Hirst

24. “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

25. “As a father, I would say I am more like a mother. I do a lot of hugging.”

— Damien Hirst

26. “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

27. “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

28. “What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.”

— Damien Hirst

29. “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

30. “I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and don’t believe in art, without questioning either.”

— Damien Hirst

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Whenever I’ve been well-known or hitting the press, I’ve always had to get my credit card out to prove I’m Damien Hirst.”

— Damien Hirst

34. “In an artwork you’re always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.”

— Damien Hirst

35. “Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.”

— Damien Hirst

36. “I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It’s like a collage.”

— Damien Hirst

37. “I don’t think I’d want my pet in formaldehyde, but I guess in America they would.”

— Damien Hirst

38. “Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.”

— Damien Hirst

39. “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

40. “A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.”

— Damien Hirst

41. “The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it.”

— Damien Hirst

42. “I just hope that I can be kind of like the Beatles. I really like that kind of model. I like the way that without losing integrity they could change through fashion and not look back at the ’60s and vomit when they saw what they’d done.”

— Damien Hirst

43. “You can always tell a great painting, because when you get close there are all these nervous marks.”

— Damien Hirst

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Art comes from everywhere. It’s your response to your surroundings.”

— Damien Hirst

49. “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

50. “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