THAT QUOTE In the future everyone will be world famous for 15minutes. (1968) I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.” (1979)

SPOT: THE DIFFERENCE If the pimple on my upper right cheek is gone, a new one turns up on my lower left cheek, on my jawline, near my ear, in the middle of my nose, under the hair on my eyebrows, right between my eyes. I think it’s the same pimple, moving from place to place…If someone asked me, “What’s your problem?” I’d have to say, “Skin.”

PIESOLATION I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—The Restaurant For The Lonely Person. You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.

FILM The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because it’s three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally. All my films are artificial but then everything is sort of artificial, I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts. And I’m most concerned with, uh…doing bad camerawork and, uh…ah…and we’re trying to make it so bad but doing it well. If I ever had to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is ever completely right for any part, so if you can’t get someone who’s perfectly right, it’s more satisfying to get someone’s who’s perfectly wrong. Then you know you’ve really got something. I don’t know, it’s so easy to do movies, I mean you can, uh…uh…just shoot and every picture comes out right. What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other…Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological “For instances.” They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn’t apply to you, at least it was a documentary.

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THE IDLER

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SUMMER 2008 ON “SLEEP”, HIS THREE-HOUR FILM OF JOHN GIORNO SLEEPING Seeing everybody up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I’d better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping.

MULTI-TASKING Maybe the reason my memory is so bad is that I always do at least two things at once. It’s easier to forget something you only half-did or quarter-did.

My favourite simultaneous action is talking while eating. I think it’s a sign of class. The rich have many advantages over the poor but the most important one, as far as I’m concerned, is knowing how to talk and eat at the same time. […] At dinner you’re expected to eat—because if you don’t it’s an insult to the hostess—and you’re expected to talk—because if you don’t it’s an insult to the other guests. The rich somehow manage to work it out but I just can’t do it. They are never caught with an open mouth full of food but [it’s] always my turn to talk just when I’ve filled my mouth with mashed potatoes…I practice at home in front of the mirror and over the phone. In the meantime, until I’ve perfected the ability to talk and eat simultaneously, I stick to my basic rule for dinner party behaviour; don’t talk and don’t eat.

THE WARHOL CURE-ALL Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what?” That’s one of my favourite things to say. “So what?”

“My mother didn’t love me.” So what? “My husband won’t ball me.” So what? “I’m a success but I’m still alone.” So what? I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.

ANDY HAS A LINE People say “time on my hands”. Well, I looked at my hands and I saw a lot of lines. And then somebody told me that some people don’t have lines. I didn’t believe her. We were sitting in a restaurant and she said, “How can you say that? Look at that waiter over there!” She called him over, “Honey! Honey? Can you bring me a glass of water?” and when he brought it she grabbed his hand and showed it to me and it had no lines! Just the three main ones. And she said, “See? I told you. Some people like that waiter have no lines.” And I thought, “Gee, I wish I was a waiter.”

THE IDLER

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NOTES FROM THE COUCH

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