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Andy Warhol quotes

5 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Andy Warhol wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.

Illustrated portrait of Andy Warhol

How these quotes were checked

How we decide whether a quote is genuine

Andy Warhol's real sentences are mostly on the record — The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the ARTnews and interview transcripts — and every line in this collection is verified against the printed corpus.

His single most famous sentence is not among them, and the reason is documented below by the museum that first printed it.

Four famous Hemingway quotes, fact-checked

A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.

Unproven

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

The line's first known appearance is the catalogue of Warhol's 1968 retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Olle Granath, who compiled that catalogue's text section and later became the museum's director, has written what happened: he was given a box of everything written by and about Warhol, read it all, and delivered a manuscript. The curator Pontus Hultén told him a quotation was missing and supplied this one. Granath answered that if it had been in the material he would have found it. After a pause, Hultén said that if Warhol didn't say it, he could very well have said it, and told him to put it in. They did — and in Granath's words, Warhol's perhaps most famous quotation became a fact.

  • — Olle Granath, Olle Granath, “With Andy Warhol 1968” (Moderna Museet, Stockholm)
  • — HathiTrust full-text phrase searches for Andy Warhol quote verification, 31 August 2026
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)
If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
— Andy Warhol, interviewed by Gretchen Berg, 1967
I think everybody should be a machine.
— Andy Warhol, interviewed by Gene Swenson, ARTnews, 1963
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)
I never fall apart, because I never fall together.
— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

Questions about Andy Warhol quotes

Did Andy Warhol say “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”?

Probably not. The line first appears in the catalogue of his 1968 Stockholm retrospective, and the man who compiled that catalogue, Olle Granath, has said he could find no trace of Warhol saying it. The curator Pontus Hultén had him print it anyway, on the grounds that Warhol could very well have said it.

Who actually wrote the fifteen minutes line?

On Granath's account it came from Pontus Hultén, the curator of the 1968 exhibition, who supplied it when the catalogue's quotation section was already finished. Warhol never disowned it, and it has been attributed to him ever since.

What is Andy Warhol's most famous verified quotation?

“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975). Its rival is his answer to interviewers who asked what his work meant: look at the surface, and there he is, with nothing behind it.

Did Warhol say he wanted to be a machine?

He said “I think everybody should be a machine,” to Gene Swenson in ARTnews in 1963 — the year the Factory opened. The remark goes on: everybody should like everybody.

Where do Warhol's quotations come from?

Mostly from interviews and from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), the book assembled from his taped conversations. He was recorded almost constantly in his later years, which is why so much survives — and why the one line nobody can source stands out.

References

References

The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.

  1. 1Olle Granath, “With Andy Warhol 1968” (Moderna Museet, Stockholm)

    Website
    Moderna Museet
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Andy Warhol page.

    View source

  2. 2HathiTrust full-text phrase searches for Andy Warhol quote verification, 31 August 2026

    Website
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Andy Warhol page.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.

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