Creativity Quote by Damien Hirst

Hirst’s line performs a neat bit of bait-and-switch: it offers “the answer” to life, then immediately undercuts the very premise that life is a problem to be solved. Coming from an artist whose brand has long fused spectacle, commerce, and mortality (the shark in formaldehyde, the diamond skull), the anti-philosophical pose isn’t innocence; it’s strategy. He’s not dismissing thought so much as puncturing the self-seriousness of trying to think your way out of being alive.

The phrasing is doing the work. “Stop thinking about it” sounds like a self-help bromide until he adds the kicker: “But you’re doing that anyway.” That’s the subtextual trap door. You can agonize over meaning, optimize your routines, read the right books, adopt the right politics, curate the right identity - and you’ll still wake up hungry, bored, frightened, hopeful. The body keeps clocking in. “However you intellectualise it” carries a quiet sneer at the premium culture places on commentary, including the art-world machinery that elevates concepts, statements, and theory into currency.

There’s also an artist’s self-exoneration embedded here: if living is inevitable and thinking is optional, then the demand for moral or philosophical coherence starts to look like a category error. That dovetails with Hirst’s career, where provocation often arrives pre-rationalized after the fact. The quote isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-control: a reminder that meaning-making is often a coping mechanism dressed up as insight, and that the mess of living won’t be tamed by better prose about it.