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Keith Haring QUOTES

Keith Haring QUOTES

1 " July 7, 1986: Montreux
It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

2 " There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and
George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS.
The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered.
This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible. I’m sure that what will live on after I die is important enough to make sacrifices of my personal luxury and leisure time. Work is all I have and art is more important than life. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

3 " You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people...that doesn't make you better than somebody who has no money but is sympathetic and genuinely loving to fellow human beings. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

4 " Children know something that most people have forgotten. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

5 " Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

6 " March 28, 1987:
Today I read in the New York Times that all of the officers who killed Michael Stewart were again dismissed of charges.
Continually dismissed, but in their minds they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. The must live with that forever.
I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can nerf escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pig lady who can’t see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits.
An eye for an eye …
I’m not afraid of anything I’d ever done.
Not ashamed of anything. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

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

― Keith Haring

8 " Nothing is important...so everything is important. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

9 " Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. "

― Keith Haring

10 " The public has a right to art
The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists.
...
Art is for everybody.
...
I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

11 " Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

12 " Keith Haring wrote " You see that's why I work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. Thats the reason also why, when people say. " Well you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is[laughter]" well, do you think that I have worked like that all those years and not be changed?" This transformation of ones self by ones own knowledge is,I think something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting. "

― Keith Haring

13 " I am a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end. "

― Keith Haring

14 " This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration). "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

15 " I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

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

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

17 " Art is for everybody. To think that they—the public—do not appreciate art because they don’t understand it, and to continue to make art that they don’t understand and therefore become alienated from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn’t understand or appreciate art and is thriving in this “self-proclaimed knowledge of art” that is actually bullshit. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

18 " I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

19 " I am becoming very hard on the outside and even softer on the inside. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals

20 " People, I realize, cannot live like a patch of grass. They could, I suppose, at one time, but we are so far removed from that time that it is hard to conceive. People can, however, live their lives with the realization that they are constantly changing, products of their changing environment and changing situations, and time. They can live, at least, in harmony with the knowledge and co-exist with it instead of working against it. "

― Keith Haring , Keith Haring Journals