Graffiti Quotes

1. "Enjoy the war,' read the graffiti left on Berlin's walls. 'The peace will be terrible."
Author: Andrei Cherny

2. "Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."
Author: Annie Proulx

3. "Everything is still out there: the rooftops and chimneys, the graffiti, the office towers and the cyclists; soon there will be sheep and that immense sky the keep out in the countryside... Once I thought there were two realities, inner and outer, but perhaps that's a bit meagre; I'm not quite the same person I was last night..."
Author: Audrey Niffenegger

4. "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."
Author: Banksy

5. "Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that."
Author: Banksy

6. "Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off."
Author: Banksy

7. "All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They've been used to start revolutions and to stop wars."
Author: Banksy

8. "I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it."
Author: Banksy

9. "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?"
Author: Banksy

10. "Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access."
Author: Banksy

11. "Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet."
Author: Banksy

12. "People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly."
Author: Banksy

13. "Gray hair is gods graffiti"
Author: Bill Cosby

14. "The traffic system needs a complete rethink," mused Bryant as the unit's only allocated vehicle, a powder-blue Vauxhall with a thoroughly thrashed engine, accelerated through Belsize Park. "Look at these road signs. Ministerial graffiti." "It's no use lecturing on the problem, Arthur. That's why your driving examiner failed you thirty-seven times." "What makes you such a great driver?' "I don't hit things."
Author: Christopher Fowler

15. "A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious."
Author: Christy Leigh Stewart

16. "Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement"
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

17. "I read the graffiti written on the walls of my brain. Then I use my writing to give it voice so it won't simply be "whispered in the sounds of silence." (Apologies to Paul Simon)"
Author: Dick Peterson

18. "Law breaking, graffiti artist, dumb jock that I am, I'm pretty socially conscious."
Author: Duff Goldman

19. "Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse."
Author: Frederick Buechner

20. "Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

21. "Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students."
Author: Imogen Binnie

22. "His face is more open than an open book, like a wall of graffiti really. I realize I'm writing wow on my thigh with my finger, decide I better open my mouth and snap us out of this impromptu staring contest."
Author: Jandy Nelson

23. "Rather than demolish an abandoned warehouse, why not just cover it with graffiti and call it art?"
Author: Jarod Kintz

24. "A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall."
Author: Jaron Lanier

25. "After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture."
Author: Jeffrey Deitch

26. "[Smiley contemplates graffiti:]'Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.' The assertion caused him a moment's indecision. 'Oh, but society does,' he wanted to reply; 'society is an association of minorities."
Author: John Le Carré

27. "As she searched, she looked down at the fallen architecture and read the names graffitied on its sides. Gracus loves Lucinda. Ethan loves Sarah. Michael loves Erin. For what seemed like days she ran her fingers over the names carved into the fragmented bones of ruined loves, stepping around the broken pillars of unkept vows and dusting headstones in the graveyard of love with her hands. Every kind of death had a resting place in the dry lands. She walked until her feet bled."
Author: Josephine Angelini

28. "I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work."
Author: Keith Haring

29. "Have people been staring at you?'He frowns. ‘I don't know. I guess so. I forgot it was there. Can you really notice it?'‘Well yeah, but … I think it's great.' To me, Danny rocking up to surf with graffiti all over his face is magic. I want to tell him that I think he's precious, that the fact he talks to me is a gift. But of course you can't say things like that to people"
Author: Kirsty Eagar

30. "Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone."
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

31. "Ludwig's enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here."
Author: Magnus Flyte

32. "Jenna walked in between desks and plonked herself down behind hers, noticing AGAIN that the teacher hadn't graced the class with his zitty presence. She thought Mr. Kennan needed to get fired, which said a lot, because she rarely paid attention to ugly teachers. She'd discussed this with the principal two weeks back when she'd been sent to his office after getting caught sleeping. She'd told him that if he employed more hot teachers like Mr. Daniels then maybe she wouldn't pass out from boredom. The principal gave her a week's detention because of that comment, saying that she needed to take things more seriously. But she WAS being serious.Jenna Hamilton from Graffiti Heaven (Chapter 28)."
Author: Marita A. Hansen

33. "Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist."
Author: Mia Kirshner

34. "My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser."
Author: Mike Mills

35. "Velmi brzy zacal projevovat zájem o matematiku - dokonce tak silný, že mu otec, který nechtel zanedbat jeho filozofické, jazykové a humanitní vzdelání, zakázal v jedenácti letech císt matematické knihy, dokud nedosáhne veku patnácti let. Zákaz odvolal, když syna pristihl, jak kusem uhlí píše na zed v jakési zapadlé chodbe jejich domu svuj vlastní dukaz, že souctem úhlu v trojuhelníku je vždy prímý úhel. Bylo to asi jediné inteligentní graffiti v dejinách."
Author: Milan Mareš

36. "Here it is, all at once: rightness. Not the graffiti itself, even though it's undeniably spectacular, but this feeling of making plans and carrying them them through, of meeting people and getting to know them, of being asked to do something and saying Yes, of wanting something, asking for it, making it happen."
Author: Nina LaCour

37. "I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there."
Author: Paloma Picasso

38. "I taught Leah how to tell where we were in the Campo by using her sense of smell. The south side was glazed with the smell of slain fish and no amount of water or broom-work could ever eliminate the tincture of ammonia scenting that part of the piazza. The fish had written their names in those stones. But so had the young lambs and the coffee beans and torn arugula and the glistening tiers of citrus and the bread baking that produced a golden brown perfume from the great ovens. I whispered to Leah that a sense of smell was better than a yearbook for imprinting the delicate graffiti of time in the memory."
Author: Pat Conroy

39. "[The graffiti] had a sort of Christmassy look to it. The green paint tended to be short top to bottom but long front site to side. The red paint was fat and closed up. It sort of looked like garlands with red balls hanging down. There was even "Ho, ho, ho" if you skipped around a little and deleted an "e" on the last "ho". Our green painter had a limited vocabulary and occasionally mixed up a professional working woman with a garden implement."
Author: Patricia Briggs

40. "Some spray-painted graffiti on the wall asks, Is it nothing to you all who pass by? Lamentations 1:12 and I think, No, Lord, whoever the hell You are, this is not nothing to me. This counts."
Author: Rachel Cohn

41. "For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse."
Author: Richard Phillips

42. "MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists."
Author: Robert Hughes

43. "I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti."
Author: Sally Brampton

44. "I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places."
Author: Swizz Beatz

45. "This goes out to freedom fighters, graffiti writers, innocent lifers, grassroots organizers"
Author: Talib Kweli

46. "Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there's space for someone else, between the words and in the margins."
Author: Tammara Webber

47. "Black graffiti on a black helicopter."
Author: The Covert Comic

48. "No matter how the official narrative of this turns out," it seemed to Heidi, "these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

49. "Marina Orlova was hooked on my quote about women not owing men. I scrolled through her posted paintings and recalled a Slovak friend once commenting on a guy wanna-be a great painter, something like this: "Aaano, on bol profesionalnym maljiarom na Slovensku, maloval tam pice a hakove krize po stenach". He meant graffiti, but I hesitate to translate it in detail for it may sound too rough. Another thought is about surreal, sometimes spurious aesthetics mixed with hinted or daring sexuality, which Marina Orlova endorses, deliberately or not, in line of her claimed profession. The posts call to mind The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or even Titus Andronicus. No wonder, thousands of bozos are attracted to her internet activity because ..., well, the woman is hot."
Author: Vinko Vrbanic

50. "[Graffiti] gets erased and painted over, and maybe it's even more beautiful because we know it won't last."
Author: Wendy Lichtman

Graffiti Quotes Pictures