Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by Genesis P-Orridge - Page 2

Brian Jones had this really ethereal atmosphere around him.

In the art world, sentimentality and intimacy and the emotive side of lives are considered very uncool. There's nervousness around intimacy.

There's always a way to say something that could seem really commonplace and make it special again.

Everyone knows that when things are out of balance, things go wrong.

As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.

Once you're looking for wisdom, you have to look at why things happen and why people behave how they do: you cannot, in all conscience, accept any form of prejudice.

I've always aimed to create something pure.

In the old days, maybe we'd come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, 'This is great!' and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.

'Star Trek' works for me because it deals with the petty issues of humankind.

There is no distinction between reverence for existence and our senses and/or apathy.

A lot of the conceptualists and the prestige galleries are debasing themselves in presentations which have little else to them but the presentation.

All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.

I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him.

Life and art are inseparable.

I've discovered the joys of happiness.

Me and Lady Jaye hung out with Anita Pallenberg a few times in the house she lived in with Brian Jones.

The great irony was that, while I was being portrayed as a monster, I was in Khatmandu with my children, doing soup kitchens for Tibetan refugees, using all the money from my records to feed three hundred people a day, and working with monks connected to the Sammye Ling Buddhist centre in Scotland.

Even if the world outside is destroying itself and fragmented and paranoid and fearful, the job of the artist is to embrace and hold people and say, 'It's OK, be safe here.'

I always felt that everything that happened was incredibly exhilarating and massively puzzling at the same time. I can even remember, when I was six or seven, digging a hole beneath a tree. And I would go into this tomb, this cave that I had made, and would lie there, meditating, for hours.

Celebrity haircuts are one of the great perks of even a little media profile.

I would experiment with porridge - make porridge pancakes, fry porridge - and so friends started calling me 'Porridge.' But I got to feel that I was becoming a character, a work of fiction, in a sense.

People have become obsessed with the greed of celebrity and self-branding and wanting to be known and recognized and succeed in some way, and they're not prepared to share and help each other.

Curiosity is a great weapon for the artist.

Haircuts are luxuries and, as such, should be as expensive as you can possibly afford.

When the blues came out, it was something pure and undefined, but when all these white groups got hold of it, it became something else that didn't sound anything like the original. So you had Led Zeppelin doing their thing, which had come all the way from the blues.

My mind jumbles things, reassembles them, and plays with words without even being asked.

Within TG, we liberated the use of the lyric forever. There was no longer a taboo on what could be discussed in the conceptual format of a song.

With Thobbing Gristle, that era from '75 to '81 was a period when the politics of the time demanded anger and rage.

We should always be looking for the unity in things instead of the differences.

A band can be so much more than just a way to play songs.

My father gave me a copy of 'Seven Years in Tibet,' and that's what turned me on to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.

I am so sick and tired of being told what I'm supposed to look like!

I was very good friends with Ian Curtis from Joy Division. In fact, I was the last person he spoke with before he died.

England was very frustrating in the Seventies for anyone who was trying to wake up. It was visible in punk, in clothes, and in the revival of mods and rockers fighting. All kinds of things were going on that just weren't individual to myself.

I was born in Manchester, England.

Imagination should always be treasured, even when it's slightly off-key.

A real New Yorker is always someone who came here from somewhere else to avoid some kind of persecution, often sexual-preference based, or to be discovered in one of the infinite-though-no-longer-thriving alternative scenes, i.e. theater, music, dance, vaudeville, art, drag, or, in those of the greatest egos, to be 'the next Andy Warhol.'

I believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.

It turns out that there's a huge community of African-American musicians whose main influence is Throbbing Gristle.

We all fall into biological and mental habits. It's an easy way for us to navigate day-to-day work and life, but it also doesn't do us any favours in terms of growing into wisdom, growing into a greater understanding of each other, growing into a deeper relationship - all the things that we really crave.

And when in doubt, be extreme.

Even as a teenager we got interested in the Beats, Dada, and Surrealism, and so on. What drew us to those was that their lives were their art. It wasn't something they did separately. Reading biographies of artists of that kind was what was fascinating to me, more than the stuff they made. We became convinced that life and art is really the same thing.

Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.

An exact science is one that admits loss.

Art and life really are the same, and both can only be about a spiritual journey, a path towards a re-union with a supreme creator, with god, with the divine; and this is true no matter how unlikely, how strange, how unorthodox, one's particular life path might appear to one's self or others at any given moment.

Industrial culture? There has been a phenomena; I don't know whether it's strong enough to be a culture. I do think what we did has had a reverberation right around the world and back.

After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.

People say, ''I'm a woman trapped in a man's body'' or ''I'm a man trapped in a woman's body,'' but I say ''I'm trapped in a body.''

All great music is in one way or another psychedelic.

the voluntary relinquishing of responsibility for our lives and our actions is one of the greatest enemies of our time.