Top 169 Graffiti Quotes & Sayings

I got caught doing graffiti with my friend in broad daylight once.

I didn't have much of a life in crime as a graffiti writer.

I did an art show for Donald Trump at his house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a bunch of pop art and stuff like that, so I wasn't doing any graffiti at that time, so I'd say from about 2000 to 2006, I wasn't doing any graffiti.

I grew up around New York, graffiti culture.

Graffiti is a pathetic attempt at anonymous recognition.

Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.

Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for being naughty or aggressive.

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.

Street art, unlike graffiti, adds to the environment and is a positive experience for the artist and community.

His achievements read like the graffiti on the walls of a hangman's changing room.

The trains were the beating heart of the New York graffiti scene.

In college, all my friends were graffiti writers, but I never wrote graffiti. I wanted to participate and do something cool on the street, so I'd make these portraits of people. I'd isolate them on a white wall, make a silkscreen of it, and do these portraits in bathrooms and all around. That's how I started the Polaroids.

People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.

I know about hip-hop culture, whether it's graffiti writing or DJ-ing or being an MC.

Law breaking, graffiti artist, dumb jock that I am, I'm pretty socially conscious.

Gray hair is God's graffiti.

Rhyme written in graffiti xeroxed on blueprints, students influenced are now a nuisance.

The whole world is covered in graffiti. No one cares. It's just part of urban noise.

Reinvention is the biggest gift I've been given. I've gone from graffiti artist to jewellery maker, urban musician to conductor.

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you'd bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire.

Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

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

All the work I did was to challenge politics, culture, and women's rights. I felt like I really wanted to break out. That's why I wanted to use graffiti. It's more open. I don't need people to come to an exhibition. Graffiti gives a voice to the walls.

One piece of graffiti doesn't mean much. Forty pieces of graffiti might mean something... It's all about connecting the dots.

I love graffiti because it enables kids from every social extraction to do something that brings them closer to art, when they normally wouldn't be stimulated to be visually creative. Graffiti helps to develop an awareness of immediate expressive and uncontrolled freedom.

Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn't become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you're the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.

Everybody's trying to leave their mark on the world. That's why there's graffiti and babies.

Berlin is still a very edgy place, a very cosmopolitan place. It's a place where completely different ideas and cultures come together and clash in a very warm way. In a very warm-hearted way. It's a very young city. It's a vibrant city. It's an exciting city. It's a city that's also scarred by history. I think that's to be celebrated and graffiti is to be celebrated. Graffiti in Berlin is very different than when they spray something on the wall dividing the west bank and Israel. And should be treated as such in Berlin.

I had just been doing graffiti around New York and this real estate investor guy had walked through meat packing in New York and saw some of my graffiti. He was impressed and asked if I sold canvases. I really had not made any canvases of my graffiti work yet, but told him I could make one for him. He then commissioned me to make ten paintings and put on my first art show. Between the sold out show and the cops chasing after me it created a lot of media and I've been doing really well since then.

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

A tattoo is graffiti on the temple of the body.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone’s graffiti.

Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.

I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.

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

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

'The Wood' was sort of like 'American Graffiti' for me in a lot of different ways.

I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.

Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.

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

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

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

Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.

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.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those 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 somebody smile while they're having a piss.

When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.

When I got into graffiti, it was the most-exciting art form and it changed the course of my life.

The pool table, like bathroom graffiti and horrible lighting, is a dive bar staple.

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

'American Graffiti' was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.

Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.

Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.

I hate graffiti. It's not yours - don't draw on it! Is it that hard to comprehend?

When I was 12, I decided to become a musician. 'Physical Graffiti' was the first album I ever owned.

Graffiti is art, but you don't see graffiti in the National Gallery. Graffiti is on the street - that's where it belongs.

I didnt 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 didnt know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

Anyone who asks if graffiti is really art should be cast out into a field, because they're Neanderthals.

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.

Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But in my paintings it's more lyrical.