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" There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening. "

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" A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting. "

" In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting. "

" Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art. "

" Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom. "

" I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say. "

" The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me. "

" The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero. "

" All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much. "

" I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products. "

" Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered? "

" What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap. "

" In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase. "

" One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning. "

" There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing. "

" You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste. "

" Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding. "

" I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it. "

" Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father. "

" I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses. "

" I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a kind of constant euphoria. "

" My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game. "

" When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything. "

" I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. "