Top 15 Peter Blake Quotes

I don't think artists should be sponsored. You should not rely on grants. You either make a success of your art or you don’t. I worked as an artist for a number of years without making much money – I have never had any financial backing in that way. Things are now very good for me but for a lot of the time things were not.

I say to people I'm in my late period. Obviously, as you get older you're in your late period anyway, but to decide you are becomes a concept. It's related to the concept of my retirement, which was about the fact that I'd shown at the greatest gallery in the world and I'd never top that... So, I retired from the jealousy of other artists, and ambition. I could alternatively have become a Buddhist or something — it is a kind of beatific state.

Brian Sewell is a fool. For some years he seemed to have it in for me and Hockney and [R.B.] Kitaj. Even if he wasn't writing about us he'd always find a way of bringing us in. He'd say, "so and so was a bad artist but not as bad as Hockney, Kitaj or Blake." Things like that.

I believe in fairies. Although I can't prove they exist, nobody has ever managed to prove to me that they don't.

Most artists go potty as they get older: dafter and madder as they get more celibate. So I am consciously going to do that.

I can’t work with computers but I work with someone who can. We talk about what the subjects will be and then I get a load of images about Liverpool. We then scan them and put them on a disk and then we manipulate them on the computer. I am treating them as posters. They are prints but I want them to look like posters.

People say, "Why do you paint?" and I say, to make magic.

He opened the door that so many of us went through, the door of possibility, by saying anything an artist makes is art.

Art in Britain is in a very healthy state. The artists of my generation and older are at their best — people like Howard Hodgkin and Frank Auerbach. The YBAs are still very strong, and it's exciting to wonder what the next generation will bring.

In one work Marcel Duchamp meets Tracey Emin in the desert, with three camp cowboys. In another he meets Elvis and the Spice Girls.

Sgt Pepper made me more famous but it did not change me as an artist.

People think Sgt Pepper is part of my name.

Album covers are like any other vehicle, they are a means of illustrating a story.

My dealer was a friend of the Beatles and the Stones, and he suggested they used a fine artist. I talked to the Beatles at length about what the cover would be. I worked out it would show the moment after they had played in a bandstand in the park. My big contribution was the life-size cutouts, the magic crowds."

Ever since, I have fought a vague kind of battle for some kind of fairness.