Art News printed this sentence under Warhol’s name in November 1963, in G. R. Swenson’s ‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’, Part 1 — the text Wikiquote carries ↗. But the surviving cassette of that interview, transcribed by Jennifer Sichel in the Oxford Art Journal in 2018 ↗, does not carry the first-person sentence: what Warhol says on the tape is “everybody should be a machine”, inside an exchange about homosexuality that Art News editor Thomas Hess cut. Warhol was in the room — this wording is the magazine’s.
“The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine” Andy Warhol, as printed in G. R. Swenson's "What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I," Art News 62, no. 7 (November 1963): "The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." Quote it as the magazine's published text, not as a documented Warhol sentence: the surviving tape of the interview has him saying "everybody should be a machine" (Jennifer Sichel, Oxford Art Journal 41.1, 2018).
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In context
Evoking the themes of creativity, work and character. Theme: "The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine". 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 "The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine". 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
Art News, November 1963
Article
‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’, Part 1
Publication
Art News, vol. 62, no. 7 — November 1963
Interviewer
G. R. Swenson
Reprinted in
Pop Art Redefined, ed. John Russell & Suzi Gablik (London, 1969)
Tape transcript
Jennifer Sichel, Oxford Art Journal 41.1 (2018), pp. 85–100
The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
Art News 62 (November 1963)
The excerpt above is the sentence as Art News printed it, not a transcript of the tape. Wikiquote lists a second exchange from the same interview separately: “Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody. / Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? / Andy Warhol: Yes, it’s liking things.” The tape research puts the two closer together than the printed article does — on the recording, the machine remark belongs to the same passage about liking everybody and not judging people.
Wikiquote lists the sentence verbatim among the sourced 1960s quotations on its Andy Warhol page ↗, with a full citation — interviewer, article, magazine, volume and month: ‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’, Part 1, G. R. Swenson, in Art News 62 (November 1963). That establishes what the magazine printed, not what was said in the room.
Wikipedia’s article on Warhol’s 1963–64 Self-Portraits ↗ quotes the full sentence and footnotes it to the scanned November 1963 issue of ARTnews.
That issue exists as a digitised object: the Internet Archive holds Art News 1963-11: Vol 62 Iss 7 ↗. It is an access-restricted item, so we could confirm the issue but not read the page ourselves.
Gary Comenas, whose 1963 chronology this page also cites, puts the consequence plainly on Warholstars ↗: “Warhol never said he wanted to be a machine.” The tapes have him saying “everybody should be a machine” — during a conversation about men, women and homosexuality, the point being that people should be as judgmental as a machine, which is to say not judgmental at all.
The line was already circulating in print — in its clipped form — by 1971, when Robert Hughes wrote in Time ↗: “Says Andy with utter sincerity: ‘I want to be a machine’ — which to him means never to make choices.”
The sentence was first published in Art News in November 1963 — far later than the 1931 US public-domain cutoff — so the interview and Warhol’s answers within it remain in copyright. The Internet Archive’s scan of the issue ↗ is an access-restricted item for the same reason. One sentence is quoted here for identification and commentary.
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 actually goes wrong with this one
The byline is right — Warhol sat for this interview — but very little downstream of it is. What circulates is the clipped half of a sentence that the magazine had already reworked, and the recording that survives says something else.
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The wordingAndy Warhol — but only half of him Truncated
Almost every repost stops at “I want to be a machine.” The sentence Art News printed keeps going: “…and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” The short form is not a modern invention — Robert Hughes was already using it in Time in May 1971 ↗, where it appears bare as “I want to be a machine.”
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The transcriptThe printed wording — not what the tape carries Reworked in editing
In 2018 Jennifer Sichel published the surviving cassette of the interview in the Oxford Art Journal (41.1 — transcript pp. 85–100, essay pp. 59–83), and it does not carry the first-person sentence. What Warhol says is “everybody should be a machine”, in an exchange about men, women and homosexuality and about not judging people — a conversation the published article removed. Warhol’s biographer David Bourdon had already called the interview “troublesome for art historians”: Swenson concealed his tape recorder, and some of the more “intellectual”-sounding answers “may have been doctored by Swenson”. The specialist site this page cites for that caveat, Warholstars ↗, now states the conclusion outright: “Warhol never said he wanted to be a machine.”
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The citationQuote aggregators Sourceless
The line is usually reposted with no source at all, or with a bare “1963” and nothing else — even though the full citation has sat in the open for years in the sourced section of Wikiquote’s Andy Warhol page ↗, complete with interviewer, magazine, volume and month. That citation tells you what Art News printed; for what was said you need Sichel’s transcript of the tape.
✓What is established: Art News printed this sentence under Warhol’s name in November 1963, in Swenson’s ‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’, Part 1. What the surviving tape carries is “everybody should be a machine” — so the famous first-person line is the magazine’s wording, not a documented Warhol sentence.
Context
Why everyone quotes a sentence Warhol didn’t say
By late 1963 Warhol had already given up the brushwork that was supposed to certify an artist’s soul. He was making silkscreen paintings of supermarket goods and dead celebrities — images pushed through a mesh rather than drawn by hand — and the obvious hostile question, where are you in this?, was waiting for an answer. Art News supplied one in November 1963, in the sentence everybody still quotes. It fitted the work so exactly, and the studio that followed, that for fifty-five years nobody checked it: Warhol moved into 231 East 47th Street, the foil-lined space known as the Factory, and the work came out in series, made largely by assistants, with the artist’s hand deliberately minimised.
When somebody finally did check, the tape said something else. On the recording Warhol is talking about men, women and homosexuality, and about liking everybody; the line is that everybody should be a machine — a machine as a model of not judging people, not a painter’s manifesto. That conversation never reached print. The printed version did, and it became a thesis: the National Galleries of Scotland built its 2018–19 Warhol/Paolozzi show on the quotation, which is the moment Gary Comenas pointed out it was never said. Robert Hughes had glossed the phrase in Time in 1971 as meaning “never to make choices” — a reading of a sentence, it turns out, that an editor helped write.
Warhol never said he wanted to be a machine.
A note on how much of this interview is really Warhol
The 1963 Swenson interview is the source of several of Warhol’s best-known lines, and the reason to doubt it is not new. Warhol was reportedly unwilling that day, Swenson concealed his tape recorder, and the biographer David Bourdon suspected the more articulate passages had been tidied in the writing — his named example being a remark about the literary quarterly the Hudson Review, which Warhol was not known to read. “Particularly” is the word Bourdon uses about that example: he offers it as the clearest case, not as the boundary of his suspicion.
Sichel’s transcript is what turned the suspicion into a finding, and it reaches this sentence. William S. Wilson, who knew both men, described the mechanism: Swenson’s interviews “were not printed as he submitted them to Art News, because Thomas Hess changed words in both questions and responses, editing Art News as a magazine for a wholesome family.” So the machine line stays on this page as what the magazine published under Warhol’s name — not as something anyone can show he said.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1928–1987 · American Pop artist, filmmaker & publisher
Born in Pittsburgh in 1928, Warhol worked as a commercial illustrator in New York before turning the vocabulary of advertising on fine art — silkscreened soup cans, Coke bottles, Marilyns and car crashes, made in series and largely by other people’s hands. By 1964 he was working out of the foil-lined studio at 231 East 47th Street known as the Factory, a name that doubled as a thesis. He went on to make experimental films, found Interview magazine and manage the Velvet Underground, survived being shot in 1968, and died in 1987.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Swenson, G. R. "What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I." Art News 62, no. 7 (November 1963). Reprinted in Pop Art Redefined, edited by John Russell and Suzi Gablik. London, 1969. Transcript from the original tape: Sichel, Jennifer. "'What is Pop Art?' A Revised Transcript of Gene Swenson's 1963 Interview with Andy Warhol." Oxford Art Journal 41, no. 1 (2018): 85–100.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-reason-im-painting-this-way-is-that-i-want-to-be-a/