Top 90 Damien Hirst Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “I did a butterfly show in Berlin, and we had a guy who’s an expert on butterflies; who bred them all and who looks after them all in the space.”

— Damien Hirst

54. “I love color. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz.”

— Damien Hirst

55. “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 vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don’t last for ever makes them beautiful.”

— Damien Hirst

56. “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

57. “You have to step over the boundaries sometimes just to find out where theyare.”

— Damien Hirst

58. “I’m 43. I’m not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet.”

— Damien Hirst

59. “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

60. “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

61. “But whenever I look at the question of how to live, the answer’s always staring me in the face. I’m already doing it.”

— Damien Hirst

62. “As an artist, you don’t stop making art because people are not buying it.”

— Damien Hirst

63. “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

64. “If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I’d go for the Pollock every time.”

— Damien Hirst

65. “It’s such a crass idea – you’re either in love or out of love.”

— Damien Hirst

66. “The infinite possibilities. That’s what used to do my nut in.”

— Damien Hirst

67. “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

68. “I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.”

— Damien Hirst

69. “I think I like big issues, but I don’t believe in God or religion.”

— Damien Hirst

70. “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

71. “When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.”

— Damien Hirst

72. “I realised 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

73. “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

74. “A lot of people thought I wasn’t doing anything because I was spending a lot of time socialising and going out, but I’ve always managed to get work actually done.”

— Damien Hirst

75. “Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that’s posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can’t take it any more is different.”

— Damien Hirst

76. “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

77. “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

78. “I don’t really have a career plan.”

— Damien Hirst

79. “I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age – seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.”

— Damien Hirst

80. “In fact, the first piece of art I ever sold, I paid someone else to make the next one, so I could actually keep going out drinking.”

— Damien Hirst

81. “I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.”

— Damien Hirst

82. “For me, art is always a kind of theater.”

— Damien Hirst

83. “You’ve got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate.”

— Damien Hirst

84. “I used to believe I was going to live forever. And then you suddenly become aware that you’re not.”

— Damien Hirst

85. “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

86. “As soon as something becomes art I think you get over the fear.”

— Damien Hirst

87. “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

88. “I always ignore money.”

— Damien Hirst

89. “But I could never make a judgement that something was obscene.”

— Damien Hirst

90. “I liked The Beatles a lot when I was growing up.”

— Damien Hirst

91. “But I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they’re taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it’s a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it’s unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.”

— Damien Hirst

92. “Artists are like everybody else.”

— Damien Hirst

93. “I just do what everybody asks me to do, in terms of media and stuff.”

— Damien Hirst

94. “I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don’t like contemporary art.”

— Damien Hirst

95. “I used to watch ‘Top of the Pops’ when I was a kid and say ‘Yeah!’ or ‘Boo!’ at every single song. So there was nothing in the middle. You brutally put it on one side or another.”

— Damien Hirst