Banksy Quotes
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I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
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Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.
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'Nobody ever listened to me until they didn't know who I was.'
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'We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.
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I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.
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'You can win the rat race but you're still a rat.'
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'I sucked a lot of liberal cocks to get where I am today.'
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'There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.' - Metropolitan Police Spokesperson
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'Try to avoid painting in places where they still point at aeroplanes.'
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'Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.'
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'We don’t need any more heroes; we just need someone to take out the recycling.'
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The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a sh*t.
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'People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one.'
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On Painting Rats, and the Glorification of Them. They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.
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'I got home at last and crawled into bed next to my girlfriend. I told her I'd had an epiphany that night about using stencils and she told me to stop taking that drug 'cos it's bad for your heart.'
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All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars.
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'Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.'
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I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.
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I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website - but on the internet, people only look at pictures of kittens.
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Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn't become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you're the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.
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I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.
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I am unable to comment on who may or may not be Banksy, but anyone described as 'good at drawing' doesn't sound like Banksy to me.
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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.
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If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.