Quotes by Roy Lichtenstein

“Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.”

“Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.”

“I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.”

“I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.”

“There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.”

“I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to bett...”

“What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopi...”

“Pop Art is the use of commercial art as a subject matter in painting, I suppose. It was hard to get a painting that was despicable enough so that no one would hang it – everybody was hanging everyt...”

“Well, it [ (Pop Art ] is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on u...”

“'How can you [accept] exploitation?' 'How can you like the complete mechanization of work?' 'How can you like bad art?' I have to answer that I accept it as being there, in the world.”

“I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comics are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usabl...”

“Organized perception is what is art all about.. .It is a process. It has nothing to do with any external form the painting takes, it has to do with a way of building a unified pattern of seeing...”

“In Abstract Expressionism the paintings symbolize the idea of ground-directedness as opposed to object-directedness. You put something down, react to it, put something else down, and the painting i...”

“Artists have never worked with the model – just with the painting. What you [G. R. Swenson, the interviewer] are really saying is that an artist like Cézanne transforms what we think the painting o...”

“My work is actually different from comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place, however slight the difference seems to some. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.”

“I paint directly – then it's said to be an exact copy; and not art, probably because there's no perspective or shading. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself....”

“One of the things a cartoon does is to express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style. To express this thing in a painterly style would dilute it; the techniques I...”

“Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values see more askew.. .I think t...”

“I think my work is different from comic strip – but I wouldn't call it transformation.. .What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have sh...”

“There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Miro and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.”