Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. Profoundly inspirational Andy Warhol quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.

Famous Andy Warhol Quotes

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. – Andy Warhol

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art. – Andy Warhol

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do. – Andy Warhol

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. – Andy Warhol

It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are. – Andy Warhol

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own. – Andy Warhol

The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet. – Andy Warhol

I think everybody should like everybody. – Andy Warhol

I’m really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts – Andy Warhol

Look poor, think rich. – Andy Warhol

I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment.’ – Andy Warhol

Land really is the best art. – Andy Warhol

A friend of mine always says, ‘Women love me for the man I’m not.’ – Andy Warhol

I still care about people, but it would be so much easier not to care. I don’t want to get too close; I don’t like to touch things. – Andy Warhol

Exposure and attention make a work famous – the more you talk about it, the more attention it gets, the more validity it achieves. – Andy Warhol

Two people kissing always look like fish. – Andy Warhol

The idea of America is so wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is – Andy Warhol

I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up. – Andy Warhol

I’ve never met a person I’ve couldn’t call a beauty. – Andy Warhol

During the ’60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me. I don’t really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the ’60s I never thought in terms of ‘love’ again. – Andy Warhol

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets. – Andy Warhol

People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like you’re watching television — you don’t feel anything. – Andy Warhol

If there’s ever a problem, I film it and it’s no longer a problem. It’s a film. – Andy Warhol

At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn’t find any takers, so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone… I became a loner in my own mind… I decided I’d rather be alone. – Andy Warhol

I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don’t know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone’s vision to 20-20. That’s an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren’t for glasses. – Andy Warhol

I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is ‘In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.’ – Andy Warhol

The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do. – Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have. – Andy Warhol

I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens. – Andy Warhol

As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic. – Andy Warhol

Success is what sells. – Andy Warhol

I’ve always thought that the President could do so much here to help change images. If the President would go into a public bathroom in the Capitol, and have the TV cameras film him cleaning the toilets and saying ‘Why not? Somebody’s got to do it!’ then that would do so much for the morale of the people who do the wonderful job of keeping the toilets clean. I mean, it is a wonderful thing that they’re doing. – Andy Warhol

Everybody must have a fantasy. – Andy Warhol

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. – Andy Warhol

I broke something and realized I should break something once a week to remind me how fragile life is. – Andy Warhol

A picture means I know where I was every minute. That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary. – Andy Warhol

You meet rich people and you hang around with them, and one night they’ve had a few drinks and they say ‘I’ll buy it!’ Then they tell their friends, ‘You must have this person’s work, darling,’ and that’s all you need. That’s all it takes. Get it? – Andy Warhol

People should fall in love with their eyes closed. – Andy Warhol

Fashion is more art than art is – Andy Warhol

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet. – Andy Warhol

I think anybody can take a good picture. My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous. It’s being in the right place at the wrong time. – Andy Warhol

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat or in film’s case ‘run on’ manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. – Andy Warhol

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they’ll just have to learn how to be babies longer. – Andy Warhol

I can never get over when you’re on the beach how beautiful the sand looks, and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own. – Andy Warhol

I never fall apart, because I never fall together. – Andy Warhol

Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don’t. Usually I think about my condominium. – Andy Warhol

Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good-night. – Andy Warhol

There is beauty in everything, just not everybody sees it – Andy Warhol

Perception precedes reality. – Andy Warhol

You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand because those are the only good things. – Andy Warhol

Art is what you can get away with. – Andy Warhol

Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves? – Andy Warhol

I smoke pot because I want to go to heaven before I die – Andy Warhol

When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them. – Andy Warhol

Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life. – Andy Warhol

People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting. – Andy Warhol

I wake up every morning. I open my eyes and think: here we go again. – Andy Warhol

Everything will be art, and nothing will be art, because everything, as I believe, already is. – Andy Warhol

I am a deeply superficial person. – Andy Warhol

The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls–blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked–stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown). – Andy Warhol

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches. – Andy Warhol

Fantasy love is much better than Reality Love. – Andy Warhol

When you stop wanting something, you get it. – Andy Warhol

The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting – Andy Warhol

I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do. – Andy Warhol

Kiss me with your eyes. – Andy Warhol

You need to let little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you. – Andy Warhol

Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going. – Andy Warhol

There should be a course in the first grade on love. – Andy Warhol

Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains – daisy chains – of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between ‘his,’ ‘her’ or ‘their’ wish and yours. – Andy Warhol

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell? – Andy Warhol

I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again. – Andy Warhol

I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. – Andy Warhol

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects – the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism – are daily devalued by commercial art. – Andy Warhol

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships. – Andy Warhol

It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. – Andy Warhol

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details. – Andy Warhol

I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. – Andy Warhol

Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don’t know whether I’m alive or whether I died. I wasn’t afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn’t feel fear. But I am afraid. I don’t understand why. – Andy Warhol

It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger. – Andy Warhol

Employees make the best dates. You don’t have to pick them up and they’re always tax-deductible. – Andy Warhol

I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment.’ – Andy Warhol

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly. – Andy Warhol

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. – Andy Warhol

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores. – Andy Warhol

If you’re not trying to be real, you don’t have to get it right. That’s art. – Andy Warhol

Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. – Andy Warhol

If you wear a wig, everybody notices. But if you then dye the wig, people notice the dye. – Andy Warhol

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. – Andy Warhol

I always hear myself saying, ‘She’s a beauty!’ or ‘He’s a beauty!’ or ‘What a beauty!’ but I never know what I’m talking about. – Andy Warhol

I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike. – Andy Warhol

I’m the type who’d be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn’t going to. I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom. – Andy Warhol

Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil – of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape-record them. But I didn’t think of myself as evil – just realistic. – Andy Warhol

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. – Andy Warhol

I want to die with my blue jeans on. – Andy Warhol

I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordina ry. – Andy Warhol

I think the first photograph I did was a ballplayer. It was a way of showing action or something. – Andy Warhol

I’ll bet there are a lot of artists that nobody hears about who just make more money than anybody. The people that do all the sculptures and paintings for big building construction. We never hear about them, but they make more money than anybody. – Andy Warhol

I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows. – Andy Warhol

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night, I start spreading rumors to my dogs. – Andy Warhol

When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums. – Andy Warhol

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. – Andy Warhol

I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally, one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money. – Andy Warhol

I went to vote once, but I got too scared. I couldn’t decide whom to vote for. – Andy Warhol

I think kids should go to high school until they’re 30. No, really, because people are staying younger now and there’s nothing to do. If you stayed longer, then it would be really great. – Andy Warhol

I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with. – Andy Warhol

My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person. – Andy Warhol

I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine. – Andy Warhol

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. – Andy Warhol

I’m for mechanical art. When I took up silk screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction. – Andy Warhol

Voyeurism is a director’s job description. It’s an artist’s, too. – Andy Warhol

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it. – Andy Warhol

I’ve been invited to the White House about five times. I think the greatest thing would be if they actually invited everybody to the White House every night… they’d just take about 500 people a night. Everybody would just love this country because it’s so thrilling to go there. It really is. – Andy Warhol

I’ve decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks. – Andy Warhol

So many people seem to prefer my silver-screenings of movie stars to the rest of my work. It must be the subject matter that attracts them, because my death and violence paintings are just as good. – Andy Warhol

I think they should have movies in restaurants. I can’t believe that so many people get together just to sit there. It’s so abstract… isn’t it abstract? What are these people sitting here watching? – Andy Warhol

I think Chris Burden is terrific. I really do. – Andy Warhol

I like to work when I’m not working – do something that may not be considered work, but to me it’s work. Getting exercise by going to the grocery store. – Andy Warhol

many in the cast portrayed their parts as if in a stupor from marijuana, drugs or alcohol. – Andy Warhol

I think that throughout the show that there are many things that could be picked up on in terms of fashion and in terms of style. Whether it be the drawings from the 1950s or the dresses from – Andy Warhol

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ”work,” because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep. – Andy Warhol

The day will come when everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. – Andy Warhol

I never understand how the lipstick business goes on because lipstick lasts forever. – Andy Warhol

New York restaurants are about selling atmospheres. – Andy Warhol

I can’t remember my dreams more than a couple of seconds after I wake up. It’s frustrating because sometimes I dream that I’m watching a really good movie. – Andy Warhol

Traveling makes time go fast. So maybe traveling in space will give people time. – Andy Warhol

I get so tired of painting. I’ve been trying to give it up all the time, if we could just make a living out of movies or the newspaper business or something. It’s so boring, painting the same picture over and over. – Andy Warhol

If you’re traveling for five years or something like that, you’re going somewhere. But five years are being used up, and you don’t have to do anything. You just sit on the plane. That might make time go really fast. – Andy Warhol

I really like to work a lot. It makes time go by fast. – Andy Warhol

I do mostly portraits. So it’s just people’s faces, not really any ideas. – Andy Warhol

New things are always better than old things. – Andy Warhol

When I was in the hospital after I was shot they gave me drugs, but it was so great to get off those. – Andy Warhol

I really hate heights. I always like to live on the first floor. – Andy Warhol

I used to drink Coke all the time. It was so good. It gives you a lot of energy. – Andy Warhol

I’d rather do new stuff. The old stuff is better to talk about than to see. It always sounds better than it really is. – Andy Warhol

I think video is the best market. When the cassette market comes out, if you just do movies that nobody else can do, that’ll be the new way. – Andy Warhol

Nutty people are always writing me. I always think I must be on some nutty mailing list. – Andy Warhol

Uptown is for people who have already done something. Downtown is where they’re doing something now. I live uptown but I love downtown. – Andy Warhol

Everything is beautiful. Pop is everything. – Andy Warhol

I love going out every night. It’s so exciting. – Andy Warhol

Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection. – Andy Warhol

Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. – Andy Warhol

Money has a certain kind of amnesty. – Andy Warhol

I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it. – Andy Warhol

When you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that’s much more interesting in the long run. – Andy Warhol