Marcel Duchamp

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.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

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.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

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

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.

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

Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.

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.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.

I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.