Quotes about graffiti (29 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Other sources
Source: Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall
Context: Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.

World , Smile

“People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that's only if it's done properly.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Source: Wall and Piece (2005)

People

“Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: 'Yids, go back to Palestine,' so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge [sic] shouts at us: 'Yids, get out of Palestine.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003).
Quoted on U.S. radio program " Fresh Air http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4195061" (December 1, 2004).

World

“And they say he's too young to surrender
And they cry out, and they call him by name.
Their graffiti tells how he's remembered.
Still, the River runs on just the same. Run River, run.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

River by Ellis Paul

Cry

“Maybe I should add some graffiti to spice it up. For a good time call the Consort. Beast Lord eats your food and turns into a lion in his sleep. Mahon has hemorrhoids. Boudas do it better. Warning, paranoid attack jaguar on the prowl…”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Food , Sleep , Time

“gray hair is gods graffiti”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

God

“The cream-tiled walls were spattered here and there with old dried bloodstains, deep gouges that might have been clawmarks, and all kinds of graffiti. As usual, someone had spelt Cthulhu wrongly.”

Simon R. Green (1955) British writer

Source: Something from the Nightside

“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Beauty

“Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Beauty

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Source: Americus, Book I

Heart

“Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility. The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 4: Ingres I: The Years of Inspiration

Art , Drawing

“I am writing graffiti on your body.
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Both Hands
Song lyrics

Drawing

“I don't really pay much attention to it anymore. It's pretty ridiculous. I view it as a giant graffiti board for people with axes to grind — or for guys named Jimbo Wales who want to dump their girlfriends.”

Rachel Marsden (1974) journalist

On Wikipedia
Canadian pundit, Wikipedia founder in messy breakup http://web.archive.org/web/20080304021035/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/03/02/marsden-breakup.html

People , Guy

“I am an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. A graffiti artist beautifies walls; I beautify parkways and yards. I treat the garden as a piece of cloth and the plants and the trees are the embellishment of that cloth. You’d be surprised what soil can do if you let it be your canvas.”

Ron Finley American fashion designer and urban gardener

Ron Finley at TED2013 (2013)

Tree , Clothes

“People get accustomed to evil like they get accustomed to smog or noise or graffiti! But it doesn’t change what it is.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 34 “On Good, Evil, Invisible Hands, and the Wind” (p. 192)

People , Evil , Change

“Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn't do.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

talking about Guerilla Communication strategies in "Urban Hacking" http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts1536/ts1536.php, transkript, p. 106

People , Reading

“Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don't need an education to understand it and there's no admission fee.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

(Tristan Manco. Stencil Graffiti)
Other sources

Money , Education , Way , Understanding

“T. V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Wall and Piece (2005)

Painting

“Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good."”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.
Bongo in Childhood Is Hell (1988)

Love , Lie , Making love , Dogs

“It was a rotten world, full of treachery and evil, and you had to be on your toes at all times, ready to combat, outfox, outwit, outdeal everybody else. Archie endorsed the graffiti he had once seen scrawled on a downtown brick wall: Do Unto Others, Then Split.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 40

World , Evil , Time

“Everything that happened prior to and during 2000 was premeditated, well planned with all the personal graffiti being churned out through government offices and business outlets … ludicrous paraphernalia designed to malign the former President's family's character. Some members of the 2000 and current Senate were openly telling the public that the Government was going to be changed soon. So what was the Fijian cause all about?”

Ateca Ganilau (1951) Fijian chief

Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill, 24 July, 2005

Family , Business , Change , Personality

“Anarchist reactionary, running-dog revisionist
Hindu, Muslim, Catholic creation, evolutionist
Rational, romantic, mystic, cynical, idealist
Minimal expressionist, post-modern neo-symbolist

Armchair rocket scientist, graffiti existentialist
Deconstruction primitive performance photo-realist
Be-bop or a one-drop or a hip-hop, lite-pop-metallist
Gold adult contemporary, urban country capitalist
-- You Bet Your Life (1991)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Life , Dogs , Photo , Country

“The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion… the powerless saying: I'm here, too.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"The Pleasure of the Image" (1985) from Writers on Artists edited by Daniel Halpern (1988), p. 98, North Point Press ISBN 0-86547-340-4

“I once asked a distinguished biologist to explain to me the genetic imprint, the famous double helix which differentiates one being from another. He called it "the graffito of God", because it can never be erased. All other imprints — of memory, environment, experience — he called "human graffiti."”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Pope Leo XIV in Ch. XV
Lazarus (1990)

God , Memory

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Life , Death , Money , Fate

“Like Duchamp's 'ready mades' - manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items - a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion… Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip… fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.”

Dick Hebdidge

Dick Hebdidge (1979). . p.106-12

School , Art , Fashion , Clothes

“All the walls of a city, which, by family tradition, seemed so mine, witnessed the martyrdom and the inhumane repression inflicted on our people. Cultural memories stressed its urgency. All the archaeological information I have absorbed, the advice of Leonardo da Vinci, the destruction brought about by Dada, the photographs of Brassaï, all contributed, unsurprisingly, to the fact that my first works of 1945 had something to do with street graffiti and a universe of repressed protest, clandestine yet full of life, as one could find on the walls of my country.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

Tàpies is referring to the Franco-repression in Spain.
1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Life , People , Family , Universe

“On Tuesday I went around San Francisco dressed in overalls designating large parts of it as legal graffiti areas.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Existencilism (2002)

Parting

“Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Wall and Piece (2007)

Painting , People