Richard Prince Quotes

“Some people are better at handling the limelight than others.”

— Richard Prince

“I have no fear of changing looks.”

— Richard Prince

“I love deliberately badly written books.”

— Richard Prince

“Making art has never been a mystery to me. It's never been something that's very difficult.”

— Richard Prince

My studio is the only place I feel good in. There, I'm fearless; outside, I'm a mess.

— Richard Prince

“Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone's work, I think to myself, 'Gee, I wish I had done that.'”

— Richard Prince

“It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes.”

— Richard Prince

I don't collect books just because other people collect them, and I'm not going to have books in my collection if I think it's badly written.

— Richard Prince

“In a way, I pattern myself after all the bands I used to like as a kid. Every time they put out LPs, they had a whole new look and a new sound.”

— Richard Prince

“I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.”

— Richard Prince

“The problem with art is, it's not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There's no umpire; there's no judge. There are no rules. It's one of its problems. But it's also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.”

— Richard Prince

“We do not make art. We have unnamable motors and dangerous impulses that occupy our thoughts.”

— Richard Prince

“I wouldn't mind people saying, "You can't do this because this isn't enough."”

— Richard Prince

“Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing.”

— Richard Prince

“I got a job in the tear-sheets department, ripping up magazines like People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time, and delivering the editorial pages ... So I began to use a camera to make fake photographs of the ads. By re-photographing a magazine page and then developing the film in a cheap lab, the photos came out very strange.”

— Richard Prince

“The subject comes first, the medium second.”

— Richard Prince

“What I find is that the taking, the stealing, the appropriation of images has to do with prior availability, and it sets up a degree where things can be shared ... It's like 50% off ... You can let something of another emotion or another personality sign on your work, or co-sign it.”

— Richard Prince

“I wish I had met [Francesca] Woodman forty years ago. It would have been great to live with her for a year. She didn't save anything. She played the camera like a new guitar. She murdered herself out taking pictures ...”

— Richard Prince

It would be strange for me to think I'm being ripped off, because that's what I do!

— Richard Prince

“A lot of it's experimental, spontaneous. It's about knocking about in the studio and bumping into things.”

— Richard Prince