Keith Haring Journals Quotes

Nothing is important...so everything is important.

Children know something that most people have forgotten.

You have to be objective about money to use it fairly. It doesn't make you any better or any more useful than any other person. Even if you use your money to help people...that doesn't make you better than somebody who has no money but is sympathetic and genuinely loving to fellow human beings.

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion.

The public has a right to art The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. ... Art is for everybody. ... I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece.

Art is life. Life is art. The importance of both is over-exaggerated as well as misunderstood.

Nothing is an end because it always can be a basis for something new and different.

I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a “self-proclaimed artist” to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses.

I am not a beginning. I am not an end. I am a link in a chain.

This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration).

I am becoming very hard on the outside and even softer on the inside.

Poems do not necessarily need words. Words do not necessarily make poems.

Art has no meaning because it has many meanings, infinite meanings. Art is different for every individual, and is definable only by the given individual.

Art is for everybody. To think that they—the public—do not appreciate art because they don’t understand it, and to continue to make art that they don’t understand and therefore become alienated from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn’t understand or appreciate art and is thriving in this “self-proclaimed knowledge of art” that is actually bullshit.

There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS. The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered. This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible. I’m sure that what will live on after I die is important enough to make sacrifices of my personal luxury and leisure time. Work is all I have and art is more important than life.

Risks are what make the difference between new ideas and re-worked old ideas.

As in all things: Time will clarify the events that are presently unclear.

I think I was born an artist. I think I have a responsibility to live up to that. I’ve spent my life up to this point trying to find out just what that responsibility

Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The

I don’t really know exactly what I want to be, but I know what I don’t want to be.

I am filled with a certain kind of doubt about my role in the world. But that does not stop me from participating in the world. It only keeps me from expecting something from the world. It

People, I realize, cannot live like a patch of grass. They could, I suppose, at one time, but we are so far removed from that time that it is hard to conceive. People can, however, live their lives with the realization that they are constantly changing, products of their changing environment and changing situations, and time. They can live, at least, in harmony with the knowledge and co-exist with it instead of working against it.

Art will never leave me and never should. So as I go into the next part of the trip I hope it will be more creative and more work involved and less talk and more doing, seeing, learning, being, loving, feeling, maybe less feeling, and just work my ass off, ’cause that, my friend, is where it’s at!

July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed.

March 28, 1987: Today I read in the New York Times that all of the officers who killed Michael Stewart were again dismissed of charges. Continually dismissed, but in their minds they will never forget. They know they killed him. They will never forget his screams, his face, his blood. The must live with that forever. I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him. They should be birds captured early in life, put in cages, purchased by a fat, smelly, ugly lady who keeps them in a small dirty cage up near the ceiling while all day she cooks bloody sausages and the blood spatters their cage and the frying fat burns their matted feathers and they can nerf escape the horrible fumes of her burnt meat. One day the cage will fall to the ground and a big fat ugly cat will kick them about, play with them like a toy, and slowly kill them and leave their remains to be accidentally stepped on by the big fat pig lady who can’t see her own feet because of her huge sagging tits. An eye for an eye … I’m not afraid of anything I’d ever done. Not ashamed of anything.

Suzy said my hair looks like there are dead animals living in it. At least they’re dead.

I paint differently every day. every hour. every minute. every instant.

am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.

The destructive element exists in all art, but ultimately is determined only by the ideas of the viewer.

I am now 28 years old on the outside and nearly 12 years old on the inside. I always want to stay 12 years old on the inside.

I wish I was not so determined to feel secure about everything. I want everything to be comfortable and in reality nothing ever is.

Knowing that it is up to me what happens next. (And knowing when it is out of my hands.)

BLACK LEATHER ITALIAN DOMINATION CALLING AFTER HE SAID BLACK EYES HIT HARD

Individuality is the enemy of this mass society. Individuality speaks for the individual and makes him a significant factor. Art is individuality.