Banksy Quotes

Well I'm frustrated by many things but trying to get accepted by the art world isn't one of them. This seems difficult for some people to understand - you do not paint graffiti in the vain hope that one day some big fat tory will discover you and put your pictures on his wall. If you draw on walls in public then you are already operating on a higher level.

I like ironies unless they're real. I was arrested for painting a picture about corruption over a billboard. As a result I spent 40 hours in a cell with the cops taking the piss and telling me lies, followed by a spell of community service and a hefty fine for which I never got a receipt and no record appeared to be kept.

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's a clever anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time. And every time someone says 'if it was down to me it would be ok, but I'm following orders' a little bit inside of you dies. If you say it as often as cops do, then there isn't much left.

At least graffiti has a fighting chance of meaning a little more to people. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. and even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in—like peace and justice and freedom.

People seem to think that if they dress like a revolutionary, they don't actually have to behave like one.

"Superficially his work looks deep, but it's actually deeply superficial." [Evening Standard]

"You could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and paint something big where you shouldn't do." — The Guardian, 2003 (taken from "Home Sweet Home - Banksy's Bristol" by Steve Wright)

Why would someone just paint pictures of a revolutionary when you could actually behave like one instead?

When graffiti first started it was about getting noticed. But with inflation 'getting noticed' is worth almost nothing these days. Now you have to be a genuine nuisance if you want to get along.

The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires...

Someone famous once said 'It takes two people to make a piece of art. One person to make the art and another person to stop them from destroying it.' Which is a more poetic than saying: 'It takes two people to make a piece of art. One person to make the art and another person to come round later from the council and sand-blast it off.

Think from outside the box, collapse the box and take a fucking knife to it.

I used to tell everyone I meant to be an artist..... I don't do that any more.