Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art

Not a documented Warhol quote — the wording is Christopher Makos’s Christopher Makos Born 1948 · American photographer; Warhol's Interview staff photographer
Disputed In copyright

The sentence turns up, in almost exactly this form, in photographer Christopher Makos’s Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir — but not as something Warhol said. Under a section headed “PHILOSOPHY,” Makos writes: “Both Andy and Man Ray, with whom I worked in the seventies, taught me the same thing,” and then sets the line in quotation marks. One sentence credited to two different mentors is a distillation, not a transcript. The line does not appear in Warhol’s own books, and Wikiquote keeps it filed as unsourced.

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

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art” popularly credited to Andy Warhol, but the wording is Christopher Makos's. In Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir (New American Library, [1989], c1988) Makos presents it as the lesson that both Warhol and Man Ray taught him. It is not found in Warhol's own books. Source: Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Andy Warhol. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Christopher Makos and his publishers (New American Library / W.H. Allen)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Christopher Makos — American photographer · Warhol's Factory and Interview circle. Theme: "Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art". 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 think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art". 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

Where the wording actually appears

Work
Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir
Author
Christopher Makos (b. 1948)
Published
New York: New American Library, [1989], c1988 — first published in England by W.H. Allen
Location
In a short section headed “PHILOSOPHY”

Both Andy and Man Ray, with whom I worked in the seventies, taught me the same thing: ‘Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide whether it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make even more art.’ Memoir, not transcript

Transcribed from the Internet Archive’s full-text search snippets of the scanned first US printing; the volume is lending-restricted, so its text is reachable only through search-inside. Note the two wording differences from the version that circulates online: “decide whether it’s good or bad” and “While they’re deciding.”

Scanned book, Internet Archive
Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir (1989)
Makos, Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir at the Internet Archive

The paper trail

  • 1988–89 — the memoir. Christopher Makos publishes Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir; the Library of Congress record bound into the scan gives “New York: New American Library, [1989], c1988” and notes it was first published in England by W.H. Allen ↗. The sentence sits under the heading “PHILOSOPHY,” credited to Warhol and Man Ray together.
  • 1989 — the biography. Victor Bockris’s The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (Bantam) ↗ prints the same sentence in quotation marks as Warhol’s own: “Andy handled the uproar brilliantly. His strategy was…” Later editions retitled Warhol and Warhol: The Biography change “strategy” to “credo.”
  • 2000s — the anthologies. The line spreads into children’s biographies and quotation collections with no framing at all, signed simply “Andy Warhol.” The children’s biographies keep Makos’s wording intact — Willet, Greenberg and Jordan all print “decide whether… While they’re deciding,” as do all five Bockris editions. It is the quotation collections (Arcturus’s 1001 Ways to Creativity among them) that soften it to “decide if it’s good or bad” and “While they are deciding” — and that is the form which went on to dominate online, down to the entry on Wikiquote’s unsourced list ↗.
  • Still unsourced. Wikiquote’s editors have never moved it into the sourced article; it sits in the “Unsourced” list on Talk:Andy Warhol ↗, and Quote Investigator has no article on it.
In copyright

The earliest printing of this wording we could locate is a book copyrighted 1988 and published in 1989, so the sentence as quoted is in copyright in the United States — nothing here is public domain. Warhol’s own writings are separately in copyright to his estate, but that is beside the point: this particular sentence is not documented in any of them.

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

How a memoirist’s summary became a Warhol quotation

Nobody invented this line out of thin air — but nobody has produced Warhol saying it, either. Three separate things went wrong on the way to the poster.

Andy Warhol Never sourced to him

The passage that carries this wording is Christopher Makos’s, and Makos attributes the lesson to two people at once: “Both Andy and Man Ray, with whom I worked in the seventies, taught me the same thing” ↗. Warhol and Man Ray cannot both have spoken one identical sentence, so what sits inside the quotation marks is Makos’s own compression of a shared lesson.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 149 Doesn’t check out

Quote aggregators routinely attach that book and page. But the Internet Archive’s full-text index does cover Warhol’s book, and a search for the sentence ↗ returns Makos, Bockris and later anthologies — not a single title written by Warhol.

Victor Bockris’s Warhol biography How it entered circulation

Bockris prints nearly the same sentence in quotation marks and hands it straight to the artist — “Andy handled the uproar brilliantly. His strategy was…” in the 1989 Bantam edition ↗, becoming “His credo was…” in the later Warhol editions ↗. From a widely read biography it passed into children’s books, quotation anthologies and finally the internet, where the framing dropped away entirely.

The idea may well be Warhol’s; the sentence is Christopher Makos’s, and Wikiquote still lists the quotation among its unsourced Warhol attributions ↗.

Context

Why this one spread so fast

It is the perfect studio-wall quote: permission to stop agonising, an instruction to out-produce the critics, and a signature from the most quotable artist of the twentieth century. That last part is the problem. Warhol’s name is one of the internet’s strongest magnets for unsourced aphorisms, and a line that sounds like factory-floor pragmatism gets pinned to him without anyone checking a page number.

What the record actually shows is a quieter and more interesting story. A photographer who had worked beside both Andy Warhol and Man Ray sat down to write a memoir, boiled down what the two of them had taught him into a single sentence, and put that sentence in quotation marks. From there a major Warhol biography reprinted it as the artist’s “strategy” and later as his “credo” — and once a sentence sits inside quotation marks next to the words his credo was, the internet stops asking who wrote it.

Two mentors cannot have said one identical sentence. What is inside the quotation marks is the memoirist’s distillation.

The bogus page citation you will see everywhere

Several aggregator sites attach the line to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975), page 149. That citation does not hold up: the Internet Archive’s full-text index includes Warhol’s book — a control search for its well-known “interested in buying my aura” passage returns it directly — yet a search for “Don’t think about making art, just get it done” returns Makos, three Bockris editions, a clutch of children’s biographies and several quotation anthologies, and none of Warhol’s own titles.

The wording also drifted. Makos prints “Let everyone else decide whether it’s good or bad” and “While they’re deciding”; the version that circulates online has smoothed these to “decide if it’s good or bad” and “While they are deciding.” Small changes, but they are the fingerprint of a quote that has passed through many hands rather than one that was copied from a page.

Explore

Filed under

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

Creativity Work Doubt

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.

Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoirarchive.org

The scanned Makos memoir (New American Library, 1989) — the earliest printing of this wording that we could locate.
Search Inside: “make even more art”openlibrary.org

Full-text search across the Internet Archive’s books; the Makos snippet reads “…hate it. While they’re deciding, make even more art.’”
Search Inside: “with whom I worked in the seventies”openlibrary.org

Returns the framing clause verbatim: “PHILOSOPHY Both Andy and Man Ray, with whom I worked in the seventies, taught me the same thing…”
Talk:Andy Warhol — unsourced listen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote editors keep this quotation on the talk page under “Unsourced” rather than in the sourced article.
The Life and Death of Andy Warholarchive.org

Victor Bockris’s 1989 Bantam biography, which prints the line in quotation marks as Warhol’s own “strategy.”
Christopher Makos — biographymakostudio.com

The photographer’s own biography, confirming the Man Ray apprenticeship and the Warhol friendship the memoir describes.

Earliest printing

The man in whose book the sentence first appears

Christopher Makos

Born 1948 · American photographer · Warhol's Factory and Interview circle

Christopher Makos was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1948, studied architecture in Paris, and briefly worked as an apprentice to the Surrealist photographer Man Ray. He met Andy Warhol in 1976 and became staff photographer for Warhol’s Interview magazine, travelling with him for years and introducing him to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring; Warhol called him “the most modern photographer in America.” His 1989 book Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir is where the famous “just get it done” sentence appears in print — in Makos’s own summary of what his two mentors taught him.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest printing located

Christopher Makos, Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir (New York: New American Library, [1989], c1988), in the section headed “PHILOSOPHY”: “Both Andy and Man Ray, with whom I worked in the seventies, taught me the same thing: ‘Don’t think about making art, just get it done…’” Repeated as Warhol’s own “strategy” in Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam Books, 1989).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/dont-think-about-making-art-just-get-it-done-let-everyone/

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