When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.

Roy Lichtenstein

Work Your You

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Roy Lichtenstein

Art World Tin

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Roy Lichtenstein

Art Us Transform

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

Roy Lichtenstein

Learning Experience Art

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

Roy Lichtenstein

Art Wit Thing

I don't have big anxieties. I wish I did. I'd be much more interesting.

Roy Lichtenstein

Wish Tin Tie

I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

Roy Lichtenstein

Society Car Art

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Roy Lichtenstein

Work Age Would

I think you go nuts when you get older.

Roy Lichtenstein

You Think Thin

I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things.

Roy Lichtenstein

Way Think Things

I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.

Roy Lichtenstein

Men Art Use

Everybody has called Pop Art 'American' painting, but it's actually industrial painting.

Roy Lichtenstein

Art Very Us

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

Roy Lichtenstein

Relationship Car Art

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

Roy Lichtenstein

Work T Seeing

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

Roy Lichtenstein

You Us Think

Something terrible can happen in my life, but I wouldn't put it in my art.

Roy Lichtenstein

Life Art Would

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

Roy Lichtenstein

Work Yin Were

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.

Roy Lichtenstein

Work Change Worked

I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.

Roy Lichtenstein

Work Music Yin

In America the biggest is the best.

Roy Lichtenstein

T Me He

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

Roy Lichtenstein

Change Art Would

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

Roy Lichtenstein

Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.

Roy Lichtenstein

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

Roy Lichtenstein

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'

Roy Lichtenstein

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

Roy Lichtenstein

Making something good and saying something brilliant are not two things. When you make your own statement, there is a higher energy level, and you do better painting.

Roy Lichtenstein

I thought art was a sort of romantic life, or I don't know what I thought art was like. But I learned practically everything I know from Ohio State. And I'm really glad I went.

Roy Lichtenstein

I wasn't sure pop art or my work would last more than six months.

Roy Lichtenstein

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

Roy Lichtenstein

When I was going to school and under the influence of Abstract Expressionism, I believed that if you had a give-and-take rapport with your work that it would be you, and that would be all that was required. It would be honest, and the core of your personality would come out if you responded to position and contrasts in your work.

Roy Lichtenstein

Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this.

Roy Lichtenstein

I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way.

Roy Lichtenstein

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.

Roy Lichtenstein

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

Roy Lichtenstein

Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.

Roy Lichtenstein

I drew as a child, they tell me. I can vaguely remember doing it. And then I drew again in the late years at high school.

Roy Lichtenstein

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

Roy Lichtenstein

I've never done an anguished painting.

Roy Lichtenstein

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

Roy Lichtenstein

You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

Roy Lichtenstein

Picasso's sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.

Roy Lichtenstein

I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.

Roy Lichtenstein

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.

Roy Lichtenstein

I think art was the one thing my high school didn't give. And I think that was probably one reason why I was interested in it.

Roy Lichtenstein

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

Roy Lichtenstein