Keith Haring Quotes

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Keith Haring

Profession : Artist

Birth : May 4, 1958

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

Keith Haring

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

Keith Haring

My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.

Keith Haring

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

Keith Haring

Art is nothing if you don't reach every segment of the people.

Keith Haring

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

Keith Haring

Everybody draws when they are little.

Keith Haring

Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.

Keith Haring

Nothing is important... so everything is important.

Keith Haring

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

Keith Haring

I think it's more important to make a lot of different things and keep coming up with new images and things that were never made before, than to do one thing and do it well.

Keith Haring

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

Keith Haring

I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.

Keith Haring

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

Keith Haring

I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.

Keith Haring

The public needs art - and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize that the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for a few and ignore the masses.

Keith Haring

When I die there is nobody to take my place.

Keith Haring

People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

Keith Haring

I've always wanted to work for Walt Disney. That's what I thought I was going to do when I grew up.

Keith Haring

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

Keith Haring