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

In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
Marcel Duchamp

Can works be made which are not 'of art'?
Marcel Duchamp

Marcel, no more painting; go get a job.
Marcel Duchamp

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.
Marcel Duchamp

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.
Marcel Duchamp

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
Marcel Duchamp

Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.
Marcel Duchamp

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.
Marcel Duchamp

There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening.
Marcel Duchamp

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
Marcel Duchamp

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.
Marcel Duchamp

The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
Marcel Duchamp

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
Marcel Duchamp

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
Marcel Duchamp

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.
Marcel Duchamp

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
Marcel Duchamp

Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.
Marcel Duchamp

Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
Marcel Duchamp

In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.
Marcel Duchamp

When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.
Marcel Duchamp

A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.
Marcel Duchamp

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.
Marcel Duchamp

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.
Marcel Duchamp

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

My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation.
Marcel Duchamp