LAURIE SIMMONS

I'm innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.

We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.

My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'

When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.

I love acting. I can't believe how fun it is and how in-the-zone I am when I'm doing it.

I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture.

When I had my first show at Artists Space in 1979, I imagined my life like game show. There were two doors: one door had a big dollar sign on it, and the other just had sort of a blurry picture of a newspaper - the money door or the critical response and acclaim door.

Your ringtone is so personal to you, but the fact is millions of other people have your ringtone. I really love that connection, and call me crazy, but I find the iPhone ringtones super melodic and very danceable.

I thought my father was biggest, tallest, smartest, handsomest man in the world, so if he was telling me something, I was taking it really seriously.

My subject has always been women. And I don't want to sound, like, preposterously idealistic, but I would like, in my lifetime, to experience a world where women, all kind of women, can connect and support each other.

I can't even relate to the idea of raising a feminist.

I always say I'm an artist with the soul of a realtor.

I think the art world is one of the last bastions of this kind of sexism where there is a mythology about a woman not being able to be both and artist and a mother: that some very important creative crystal inside a woman would be shattered by the idea of having a child.

I had grown up in a world dominated by women - I had aunts and sisters and great-aunts - and I just felt like I lived in a completely female world.

From the time I started taking photographs, I started working with plastics. I've always treated plastic like it was marble or gemstone or fine glass. I've always gotten the most out of it. I love it!

There's part of our culture where uniqueness is celebrated and appreciated and another part of our culture where this one way to be - one color hair, one sized breasts, one kind of nose - that's also front and center.

I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.

It's funny: when you're an artist, your own work goes in and out of fashion with you.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

I don't like touching things that are the curatorial flavor of the month.

I've always written about other artists, or I write my thoughts down, but I've never written a story.

I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say 'housewife'? A home engineer.

I think, with my own daughters, rather than preaching a feminine agenda, I just really try to help them understand what it meant to be a woman in the late 20th century and the consciousness of how to be a woman in the 21st century: What is working for you and what is working against you.

Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them.