Quotes by Marcel Duchamp

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.' 

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good---I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. . . .

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.