To all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.

Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see