93 Quotes by Claes Oldenburg

I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don’t always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun.

It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn’t like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.

I always knew America was all about guns. You go to the movies as a kid, everybody’s got a gun.

When you’re working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn’t make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I’d become a writer.

The sexual is part of everything, and it’s highly formalized. I hadn’t done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, “Why not the erotic figure?”

Of course, the ’60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the ’60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, “I’m afraid I have to go to New York after all.”

I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn’t go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.