Top 50 Julian Schnabel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I work with things left over from other things.”

— Julian Schnabel

2. “I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.”

— Julian Schnabel

3. “I think beauty is a feeling that you get after you’ve had an experience. It’s the way you feel about it that is beautiful.”

— Julian Schnabel

4. “Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.”

— Julian Schnabel

5. “It doesn’t matter what I think I am, it matters what I do.”

— Julian Schnabel

6. “I do dream about art, and images come to me in dreams. I am definitely hoping to be in touch with my subconscious. I expect a call any minute.”

— Julian Schnabel

7. “I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.”

— Julian Schnabel

8. “Making a painting is like playing the saxophone. You hit the note and it comes out.”

— Julian Schnabel

9. “Paintings are not like the Internet. They’re not like movies. They’re not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That’s the great thing about them.”

— Julian Schnabel

10. “My compulsion is to create things.”

— Julian Schnabel

11. “I don’t like building, I’m not a carpenter, I don’t like constructions particularly and things like that, but placements and the kinds of psychological weight that different materials have is pretty interesting to me.”

— Julian Schnabel

12. “Some people must go to extremes to get the world in balance for themselves. Some can’t bear bright lights, so wherever they go they search for the dark; they turn the lights down, anything to sustain some level of comfort.”

— Julian Schnabel

13. “It’s a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don’t have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own.”

— Julian Schnabel

14. “It’s nice to see your name in print. It’s interesting.”

— Julian Schnabel

15. “I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it’s nice to know the people you’re making a movie about.”

— Julian Schnabel

16. “You can’t have a good bullfight without a good bull.”

— Julian Schnabel

17. “I’m not mannerist. I don’t think I’m interested in mannerism. If I ever use it in a way, or if manner is like some kind of product of certain sorts of usage of different kinds of materials, then it’s about involution or turning in on that.”

— Julian Schnabel

18. “Everything I’ve seen becomes real once it becomes memory. The films I’ve seen are interchangeable with things that have really happened to me.”

— Julian Schnabel

19. “I don’t think my paintings are self-conscious but you feel the consciousness of them. Without them being self-conscious.”

— Julian Schnabel

20. “I think it’s good when people don’t write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan.”

— Julian Schnabel

21. “I like when people get really close to the paintings, when they can’t really get away from them, I like them to operate in that way on the viewer.”

— Julian Schnabel

22. “Maybe my work looks a little crazy, a little insane, but I don’t really see myself as a crazy artist or a shaman artist.”

— Julian Schnabel

23. “Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I’m looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.”

— Julian Schnabel

24. “I think basically I’m a painter, but I would use anything to make my point.”

— Julian Schnabel

25. “I think, basically, I’m an abstract artist. I just think that that’s not even an issue. I think everything’s abstract.”

— Julian Schnabel

26. “There are generations of people who have never seen a big plate painting in person. And they don’t know what the hell they look like, they don’t know what it feels like to stand in a room with them.”

— Julian Schnabel

27. “Sometimes I’ll dream that I saw a show and then I’ll wake up in the morning and realize that I didn’t see the show, that it was my dream. And I just remember what the paintings look like in the dream and I think, “Oh, nobody painted those. I can do that.””

— Julian Schnabel

28. “I think style is a fringe benefit that looks like you made it.”

— Julian Schnabel

29. “I think people have problems sometimes when things are too general. In fact, they are not really general at all.”

— Julian Schnabel

30. “I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I’d say my religion was more surfing than Judaism – that’s what I spent most of my time doing.”

— Julian Schnabel

31. “I think it was so unfair that people attacked Freida Pinto for being an Indian, playing a Palestinian.”

— Julian Schnabel

32. “I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.”

— Julian Schnabel

33. “My early paintings weren’t that good – I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.”

— Julian Schnabel

34. “Can I find a poetic that can be subversive enough to grab people in some subliminal way, to where they feel that they are altered and have had an experience that belonged to them?”

— Julian Schnabel

35. “There are certain times you want to be here and there are certain times you want to just go. And when you go, it’s usually so exhausting you have to check into a hospital when you come home!”

— Julian Schnabel

36. “I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.”

— Julian Schnabel

37. “There’s been too much attention on marketing. Can’t we just talk about the paintings?”

— Julian Schnabel

38. “I don’t think the meaning in my paintings comes from just using broken dishes.”

— Julian Schnabel

39. “When I made my first film, Basquiat, I think one of the criticisms was that the way I work is episodic. Later, as people started to look at the movies, they started to realize that maybe that’s my style. If I could do it better or another way, I guess I would.”

— Julian Schnabel

40. “I wanted to show painting paintings first, then the plate paintings; now I can show that I’ve sort of freed myself from stylistic inhibitions.”

— Julian Schnabel

41. “What’s interesting about making art is that you take everything you know about it and you bring it up to that point, and you start making a physical thing that addresses what that is. And when you do it, you don’t know anything about it – if it’s going to work or not work.”

— Julian Schnabel

42. “You seem to make different concessions with yourself about what you want to focus on or not, and what you want to pay attention to.”

— Julian Schnabel

43. “I guess I am ruthless too because that’s what makes a great artist. But I also respect people, I don’t go around stepping on their heads.”

— Julian Schnabel

44. “I’m not saying I’m the only Jewish person who cares about Palestinian people, but unfortunately, their voices are not necessarily heard as loudly as they should be.”

— Julian Schnabel

45. “When I’m making a movie, I don’t like to know what’s going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.”

— Julian Schnabel

46. “The thing about living in New York is that there are other artists; that is the most difficult, I think they are the hardest critics.”

— Julian Schnabel

47. “If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else’s, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.”

— Julian Schnabel

48. “I think the nice thing about showing work in New York is that other artists come to see it. When you show work in Switzerland or somewhere else, everywhere else seems to be the provinces in a certain way. You wonder what your paintings are doing on the walls and you wonder who’s looking at them.”

— Julian Schnabel

49. “Sometimes my kids might tell me they had a dream or and maybe I’ll paint some paintings from their dream. That’s one good thing you get from your kids. Rob them of their dreams.”

— Julian Schnabel

50. “I’ve never made a movie to make money. I’ve never made a painting to make money.”

— Julian Schnabel