Edward Ruscha Quotes

Good art should elicit a response of 'Huh? Wow!' as opposed to ‘Wow! Huh?'

I'm interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn't deserve being glorified. Something that's forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object.

When I first did the book on gasoline stations, people would look at it and say, Are you kidding or what? Why are you doing this? In a sense, that's what I was after: I was after the head-scratching.

I just use [the camera]. I just pick it up like an axe when I've got to chop down a tree. I pick up a camera and go out and shoot the pictures I have to shoot.

Traveling is irritating to me, but not driving. Going to the airport makes me nervous, but when I set out to just take a leisurely drive, it's blue skies and puffy clouds and time.

People refuse to believe that I've never been to Starbucks or Disneyland.

All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I've always had a weakness for heroic imagery.

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.

Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.

Most artists are doing basically the same thing - staying off the streets.

Perhaps there would be more anxiety in my work if I lived in New York.

I wasn't captivated by the romance of Paris or London. I love visiting, but I'd rather be in L.A.

Part of ego is displaying the ego. I've got ego, and I think I'm really good. But maybe I fall down in trying to sell it to people.

I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I'd been taught.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

There's so much going on today. I continually hear, sometimes from artists, that everything's done. It's been done. I fail to see that.

I don't watch TV, so I feel like I'm left out of the American fabric or something.

I travel a lot, but I don't come away with new inspiration.

I have no social agenda with my work. I'm deadpan about it.

Unfortunately, there was no Jackson Pollock of the camera.

The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.

My friends and neighbors were always fixing their cars. Soldiers who felt restless wanted to work on something, and they understood cars. Me, I like to look at cars but I was never really a mechanic.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

I knew I wanted to be some kind of artist from about 12. I met a neighbour who drew cartoons, and I had an idea I wanted to be a cartoonist - or something that involved Indian ink, at any rate.

I'd read about Los Angeles and this fact stuck in my mind: that the city gained 1,000 new people every day. In 1956! A thousand people every day! I felt: 'I want to be part of that.

When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

I believe in intuition and approaching things as instant gratification. Just do the things you want to do, make the kind of pictures you want to make.

The subject [of Los Angeles] became a general metaphor for anxiety and the speed of modern life.

As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work.

When I began painting, all my paintings were of words which were gutteral utterances like Smash, Boss, Eat. Those words were like flowers in a vase.

Yes, there's a certain power to a photograph. The camera has a way of disorienting a person, if it wants to and, for me, when it disorients, it's got real value.

I don't do social media of any kind. If I did, I may as well join Scientology.

I think the most interesting stuff comes from people who've just got nothing to lose. You know, let's kamikaze this thing - just throw themselves in it, devil may care.