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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I've never done an anguished painting.

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

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?'

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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