70 Quotes by Keith Haring

I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.

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.

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

When I die there is nobody to take my place.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

Art is nothing if you don't reach every segment of the people.

I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.

I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.

Shapes that contain no inner components of positive/negative relationships will function better with other shapes of the same nature.