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Who really said it

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches

Attributed to Andy Warhol 1928–1987 · American Pop artist, filmmaker and co-founder of Interview magazine
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Widely and consistently credited to Warhol, and entirely of a piece with his documented appetite for publicity — but no book, interview, letter or recording has been found that carries this wording. The earliest citation we could confirm is a Financial Times feature dated 5–6 December 2009, which itself quotes him without giving a source.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches” Andy Warhol (attributed) — "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches." No primary source has been located: the line is absent from Wikiquote's sourced Warhol entry, and the earliest citation confirmed is a Financial Times feature of 5–6 December 2009, itself quoting him without a source. Via Quotle.info.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Andy Warhol — American Pop artist, filmmaker and co-founder of Interview magazine. Theme: "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

What the record actually shows

Attributed to
Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
Claimed source
None. No quote site, biography or catalogue we found names a book, interview, tape or date.
Earliest citation we could confirm
Jackie Wullschlager, “Triumph of the Ordinary,” Financial Times, 5–6 December 2009 — as cited in a 2010 weblog post
Checked against
Wikiquote’s sourced Andy Warhol quotations — no match

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches. Unsourced

There is no fuller original context to show. Unlike Warhol’s documented remarks — the 1963 interview for “What Is Pop Art?”, the 1981 BBC Radio 3 conversation with Edward Lucie-Smith, the 1985 interview with Benjamin Buchloh, all of which Wikiquote reproduces with citations — this sentence arrives already free-floating, with no surrounding paragraph, no interviewer and no date.

Wikiquote: Andy Warhol (sourced quotations)

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator has never taken this one up, and it is absent from Wikiquote’s Andy Warhol entry ↗ altogether — not in the sourced sections, not in the undated ones. We checked the page’s raw text: the words “inches,” “measure,” “weigh” and “clipping” do not occur anywhere in it, including the long run of quotations the entry draws from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.
  • The aggregators carry it and cite nothing. Goodreads ↗ gives the exact wording under Warhol’s name with no book, no page and no year, beneath its own standing notice that “Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads.”
  • The oldest citation we could actually confirm is 2009, and it is second-hand. A 2010 post at A Boat Against the Current ↗ quotes the line and sources it to Jackie Wullschlager, “Triumph of the Ordinary,” Financial Times, 5–6 December 2009. That is a serious art critic repeating it — but a critic quoting Warhol in a feature is not a primary source, and she is not shown citing one.
  • A sibling version is openly doubted by the people who use it. Writing in 2014 about the variant “Don’t read your reviews, weigh them,” one blogger noted ↗ that it “is often attributed to Andy Warhol, but as with anything coming out of The Factory, it is, at the very best, a mere guess as to what the exact words were, if it was ever said at all,” citing Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (Da Capo, 2003), p. 175, where the remark is mentioned in connection with Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran.

We cannot assert a rights status, because we cannot identify the work. Nothing has been tied to a specific book, article, broadcast or recording, so there is no first-publication date to reason from — and Warhol’s own published books (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975; POPism, 1980) would in any case be firmly in copyright. Treat the sentence as unsourced text of unknown status rather than as public domain.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What gets claimed — and what holds up

This is not a case of the wrong name on the right sentence. It is the more common failure mode for a magnet name like Warhol’s: a line that everybody credits and nobody cites. Here are the claims we tested.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again unsupported

Quote sites shelve the line beside Warhol’s best-known book because that is the title printed under his name on their author pages — not because anyone has pointed to a page in it. The Goodreads entry itself carries no citation ↗, and Wikiquote’s chapter-by-chapter selection from that book ↗ does not include it.

“Don’t read your reviews, weigh them” reworded

The same thought circulates in shorter forms — “weigh them,” “don’t read your press clippings, weigh them” — all credited to Warhol, none sourced. A 2014 post using that version ↗ concedes it is “at the very best, a mere guess as to what the exact words were, if it was ever said at all,” pointing to Bockris’s biography (2003, p. 175). When a saying has three interchangeable wordings and no fixed source, the wording is not evidence of anything.

Financial Times, 5–6 December 2009 secondary

This is the oldest appearance we could confirm, via a 2010 blog post that reproduces the citation ↗. It postdates Warhol’s death and quotes him without a source of its own, so it establishes circulation, not origin. We make no claim that nothing earlier exists — only that we did not find it.

The honest answer: Warhol may well have said this, and it sounds exactly like him — but as of this check nobody has produced the page, the tape or the interview. Until someone does, treat it as attributed, not documented. Compare it with the Warhol remarks that are sourced ↗, each of which comes with a publication, an interviewer or a date.

Context

Why the line sticks

“Inches” is newsroom shorthand: column inches, the vertical space a story takes up on the page. The joke is that press coverage should be handled the way an advertiser handles it — as area purchased rather than as opinion received. Whether the write-up is admiring or savage is beside the point; what counts is how much of the page you occupied.

That is a very Warhol proposition, which is exactly why the attribution is so frictionless. He built a career on the mechanics of publicity: he moved from 1950s commercial illustration into silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and in 1969 he co-founded Interview, a magazine devoted to the celebrity Q&A, as The Andy Warhol Museum’s account of his life ↗ sets out. A line about measuring your own press is so plausible in his mouth that nobody stops to ask where it came from — and that is precisely the condition under which unsourced quotations survive.

Everyone quotes it. Nobody cites it.

Why this page says “attributed” and not something firmer

Why “attributed” rather than “disputed”: we found no rival originator, no earlier claimant, and no evidence that the sentence was invented and pinned on Warhol. What we found was silence — no primary source in either direction. Absence of a citation is a reason to hedge, not a reason to convict.

Why not “verified”: Warhol’s recorded talk is unusually well preserved — taped interviews, two ghost-assisted memoirs, a posthumously published diary — so a genuine Warhol aphorism usually has a findable home. This one does not. If you can point to the book, broadcast or transcript, we will upgrade the page and credit you.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Success Power Creativity

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Andy Warholen.wikiquote.org

The sourced Warhol quotations, by decade and by book. This line appears nowhere in it — the clearest single piece of negative evidence.
Goodreads: the quote pagewww.goodreads.com

Where most of the internet’s copies trace back to: the exact wording, credited to Warhol, with no source and a standing “not verified by Goodreads” notice.
A Boat Against the Current (2010)boatagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com

The earliest citation we could confirm: quotes the line and sources it to Jackie Wullschlager’s Financial Times feature of 5–6 December 2009.
“Don’t read your reviews, weigh them” (2014)gmcqueendita14.wordpress.com

A user of the shorter variant openly doubting it, and citing Bockris’s Warhol biography (2003, p. 175) as the closest thing to a reference.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (scan)archive.org

Borrowable Harcourt scan of Warhol’s own book of aphorisms — the volume quote sites gesture at without ever citing a page.
POPism: The Warhol ’60s (scan)archive.org

Borrowable scan of the 1980 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich memoir written with Pat Hackett — the other place a Warhol one-liner about press coverage might plausibly live.

The name on the quote

Who Warhol was

Andy Warhol

1928–1987 · American Pop artist, filmmaker and co-founder of Interview magazine

Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh on 6 August 1928 and died in New York on 22 February 1987. He spent the 1950s as a successful commercial illustrator before turning to fine art in the early 1960s, where the Campbell’s Soup Cans and the silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley made him the most recognisable figure in Pop art. He also made films, ran the Factory, and in 1969 co-founded Interview — a magazine built entirely around the celebrity conversation, which is part of why a wisecrack about measuring your own press attaches to him so easily.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this attribution

Attributed to Andy Warhol; no primary source located. Earliest citation confirmed: Jackie Wullschlager, "Triumph of the Ordinary: Shaped by the Depression, Andy Warhol Created an Art of Transfiguration and Plenty," Financial Times, December 5-6, 2009, as quoted in "Quote of the Day (Andy Warhol, Describing His Attitude Toward Bad Publicity)," A Boat Against the Current (blog), April 2010. The line does not appear in Wikiquote's sourced Andy Warhol entry.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/dont-pay-any-attention-to-what-they-write-about-you-just/

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