Top 115 Quotes & Sayings by Kim Gordon - Page 2

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.

I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that.

I don't see myself as a rock star. I don't see myself in that way. I'm interested in work that offers some sort of critical dialogue.

I never felt like I had anything really figured out. When I was a teenager, it was all about teenagers having an 'identity crisis.' That was the phrase that was used. But in my early 20s, I was still like, 'When am I going to be over that?'

No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive.

I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus - having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don't see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it's more exploring a different side of your personality.

I'll leave a store if I hate the music. If it's just, like, techno, I feel like my brain is going to explode.

I like that show 'Ray Donovan' - I'm obsessed with that. He's in Hollywood, he's some kind of a fixer, but he's also kind of a thug. And 'Scandal,' the D.C. one with Kerry Washington.

I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.

I wasn't very confident about clothes; I was always hunting through racks, never sure what looked right. It can be like that again when you're older.

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

It is fun to smash guitars.

I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends.

After you've graduated, you're supposed to be an adult and go out into the world, and you're still not formed. It's an interesting... horrible, horrible time.

I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.

Women are natural anarchists...

I was talking to somebody about the L.A. hardcore scene, and they were saying that it was hard for them to picture punk rock at the beach. Like, the aesthetic didn't mix or something - black forms in the sand.

I'm aware of how pop culture really infiltrates your expectations in a way that even if you think you're savvy about pop culture, it's so hard not to have these expectations of what a relationship should be. So I constantly feel like I have to bat those expectations down.

Twitter reminds me of an era in French literature - Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac - and the beginning of modernity and gossip. They had these fashion magazines of the time on display with all of the Emile Zola references.

People pay to see others believe in themselves.

I always think of baseball as so existential. Like, you're just out there in a field, in a big expanse of green grass.

I tend to want to listen to melancholy music, but sometimes if you're feeling too sad, you can't.

I'm really nostalgic for Malibu area because I've spent so much time there. People don't think of California as having a history.

The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.

Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.

If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are.

I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men-white male corporate society. So why wouldnt a woman want to rebel against that?

I think of myself as unconventional. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.

I always wanted to rebel.

The love for a child is more an unconditional sort of love ... Although some parents are really narcissistic. In general, I think there is an expectation that love will be unconditional, but obviously it's not - even after living with someone for years.

My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time I was really puzzled by why people liked it.

When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

Fashion, at modern time, was actually a way for women to go out in the world. There was one painting of a woman sitting at a café, drinking a beer by herself and kind of pretending to read but really watching people, that sort of thing. It fascinated me.

It's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.

Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s. They came over in the Gold Rush, actually. I have all this guilt about raising my daughter in the East. Coco's very anti-California. It's her way of rebelling.

No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour – sociopathy, narcissism – because it’s good rock and roll, good entertainment! I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.

There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music.

L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things.

Many designers are gay men making clothes for women. Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.

I really want to start playing basketball. Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise.

Political art never goes away. I started watching The West Wing show recently and I'm actually learning about how the government works in a way. It's kind of embarrassing.

Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy… But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.

Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.

I always felt like an outsider to the music world in a certain way. There was so much less of an art culture in L.A. - and particularly in the South Bay.

Recently some work I made could be seen as feminist art or work that relates to the body. That's just what I'm feeling - like it needs to be done.

In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore…Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.

I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

I really like Olivier Assayas filmmaking. He always has this global - economy thing going on.