Banksy Quotes

Pace yourself and repeat [graffitiing] as often as you feel inadequate and no-one listens to a word you say.

Every time I hear the word culture I release the safety catch on my 9mm.

It's great when you love someone so much you can sleep with other people behind their back and it doesn't even matter.

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.

'Only boys with small dicks paint pictures of big guns' - a girl in the pub overlooking Mono Lisa [holding a rocket launcher], Soho

Doing what you're told is generally overrated.

They say that if you gave monkeys a thousand typewriters at some point you'd have yourself a novel. I was wondering if you gave a thousand monkeys a thousand stick of dynamite how long would it take for them to make the city a more beautiful looking place.

I think I was lucky to learn so young that there's no such thing as justice and there's nothing you can do about it. The more useful lesson I learnt was that there's no point in behaving yourself. You will probably be punished for something you never did anyway. People get it wrong all the time.

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.

There are no exceptions to the rule that everyone thinks they are an exception to the rules.

They say big brother is watching you. But maybe big brother is watching dutch girly videos on the next screen along.

Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don't need an education to understand it and there's no admission fee.

You could say that graffiti is ugly, selfish and that it's just the action of people who want some pathetic kind of fame. But if that's true it's only because graffiti writers are just like everyone else in this fucking country.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it's a tool; 'I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw'. I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

Getting paranoid is an occupational hazard of illicit street painting, which is good. Your mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity. I'm not interested in looking at things made by people who aren't paranoid, they're not working to their full capacity.