Graffiti Quotes

“Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“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.”
― Banksy, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
― Banksy

“Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“gray hair is gods graffiti”
― Bill Cosby

“Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.”
― cath crowley, Graffiti Moon

“Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy”
― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

“Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.”
― Raymond Salvatore Harmon, BOMB: A Manifesto of Art Terrorism

“I was here but now I'm gone
I left my name to carry on
Those who liked me
Liked me well
Those who didn't can go to hell'"
-The bathroom wall”
― E.M. Crane, Skin Deep

“Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.

There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“If it takes more than 5 minutes, its not graffiti.”
― Mint Serf

“Jay was attacked with peculiar venom. Near his New York home, the walls of a building were defaced with the gigantic words, 'Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“A group of ducks is a raft, and a cluster of crows is a murder, but what collection of birds is a gang? Probably geese. They are always engaging in lawlessness and doing graffiti.”
― Jarod Kintz, Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world

“Scars - the graffiti of violence. - Harry Dresden”
― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

“Few people go to art exhibitions nowadays, the art comes to them!”
― Chris Geiger

“I like to leave little notes, around as I have traveled. It's like a semi-permanent graffiti for the soul. You know, some words or thoughts for a person's commute home, or the waitress that has been picking up people's sloppy plates all day, maybe even a mom watching her kids play in the park. You never know what is on a person's mind...maybe dread, or hate, or sorrow, or even nothing. I only hope some little thing makes them feel a bit better.”
― Owen D. Hill

“The wall in the room we shared will remind them that we were here. That we are human. Of value. Important.”
― Abi Daré, The Girl with the Louding Voice

“А тепер ми підходимо до теорії розбитих вікон, яка стосується злочинності. Її сформулювали Джеймс Вілсон і Джордж Келлінг. Вони припустили, що з дрібних ознак міського безладу — сміття, графіті, розбитих вікон, пияків у громадських місцях — формується слизький схил, що веде до більших ознак безладу і підвищення рівня злочинності. Чому? Бо сміття й графіті як норма означають, що людям байдуже або вони безсилі цьому протистояти, а це вже пряме запрошення смітити чи робити щось гірше.”
― Роберт Сапольски, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Across the street from the van was a board fence. Someone had spray-painted incomprehensible graffiti on it—could have been an ambigram for all she knew, legible upside-down as well as right-side-up.”
― S.A. Hunt, Burn the Dark

“The Final Word by Stewart Stafford

On the wall of a prominent jacks,
Came anonymous, scurrilous attacks,
Innuendo and defamatory jibes,
Scrawled by cowardly scribes,
Dared the executioner’s axe.

And whoever wrote the indecent graffiti,
Would never say it to the King in a meeting,
He’d cry: ‘Off with their heads,’
Then sleep safely in bed,
Having the final word takes some beating.

And as they walked to an undignified death,
No sarcastic words came from their breath,
They were up for the chop,
On the executioner’s block,
And would plead it was all for a bet.

So if you’ve ill words planned,
Remember to keep them in hand,
Or the butt of your jokes,
Becomes your executioner’s host,
And that’s the end of your brand.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Classical graffiti
Brick canvas modern fresco
I am the real thing”
― Nanette L. Avery

“The walls were black slate, and people had written all kinds of things on them with white chalk. I saw the phrase SEX, DRUGS AND BUGS BUNNY CARTOONS, and stopped reading after that.”
― Bob Madison, SPIKED!

“There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover."

Metropolitan Police spokesperson”
― Banksy, Wall and Piece

“A friend once told her that he had seen graffiti in a restaurant's men's room that read, "Gael Greene uses a thesaurus.”
― Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading

“The primal need for self-expression and documentation has appeared in human beings since the dawn of humankind. Our ancestors began carving shapes on rocks more than 40,000 years ago, and now graffiti has become a popular urban medium for self-proclamation an evidence of one’s egoic identity reinforcement, an innate desire to pronounce oneself and leave a mark in the world.

The wall is a sacred place. Containing layers and layers of joy and pain, it is a collective scream on the voice of humanity; it is raw, vulnerable, and real.”
― Felisa Tan, In Search for Meaning

“Graffiti is the art of the people. It is a language without clear official status, but whose instinctive quality testifies to the honesty of human experience and the true nobility of art.

Often marked with a sense of eroticism and violence, the wall conserves something pure and sacred about the human story.”
― Felisa Tan, In Search for Meaning