To protect the right of expression is the central part of an artist's activity... In China many essential rights are lacking, and I wanted to remind people of this.
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations.
Work hard. And have patience. Because no matter who you are, you're going to get hurt in your career and you have to be patient to get through the injuries.
..it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.
There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.
If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.
You've got to push yourself harder. You've got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You've got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.
Strive to follow your big dreams. If you fail, cherish the valuable experience gained during the process. There’s always a second time.
I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.
As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.
Make your work deeper and better than those before you, and eventually someone will notice. If you don't think the work is better than what you've seen, then go back until it is.
The more commercial work that is happening, the more people are operating cameras and are setting up studio lights, the greater the opportunity for drama production to happen.
Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field.
Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict.
First of all, I'd like to say here the fact that I'm not naturally a craftsman has made me work very hard.
