“Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.”

“The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.”

“... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.”

“For a moment it seemed that her impeccably impractical education—in which she'd learned about Middle English and Duchamp's urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone—wasn't useless after all.”

“The object [Duchamp's Fountain] was rejected , giving Duchamp the opportunity of issuing a statement, which he published in a review, The Blind Man. In his statement he emphasized that the act of choice was sufficient to justify it as a creative art. Placing it in such a way that its normal use was disguised caused a new reality for the object to be invented. To the criticism that it was rude he replied, logically enough,"How could this object be acceptable when displayed in a plumber's shop window and yet be immoral anywhere else?”

“No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.”