Philip Larkin Quotes

All artists are anarchists in some way - some more extreme than others, but it's something that I think artists are supposed to do. We're supposed to present a different angle on everything, and I certainly think it is [art] as much as poetry, in my opinion.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.

[Serialism] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.…

I think at some point there may be artists who will get fed up, and they deliberately want to use their art as a means to rock the waves a little bit. And instead of doing the status quo, they'll deliberately go out to really make a change. I think Kendrick Lamar is an example of that.

What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment.

I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.

I think actors make the mistake of finding their little niche in the business and once they try to do something a little darker, boom, they get slapped across the face for it, so they go back to what they did before.

Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.

There are always forces at work in a society, certainly in America, which are really forces of censorship -either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. And all art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

Terence McKenna says, "The culture is not your friend." I am not sure we can change this culture. But I think we can rise above it and create a new world. That's why I so deeply believe in alternative spaces. That's why I believe in the power of art and activism.

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

Basically I just had to say, 'Screw everyone around me - from now on I'm just gonna play what I think is important to me and our music.' So I gave the big finger to all the current trends in technical wizardry, and just went off and did what I felt was best for the songs.

Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that's been a place of hope.

Tonight I am going to defecate on stage because I think that is the only way to express the nature of my soul according to rock and roll.

I think if it doesn't do what I say, if it doesn't do what I want, if it isn't politically subversive, if it isn't sexy, if it isn't stylish to make all that happen then it isn't truthfully worth listening to.

I like art that challenges you and makes a lot of people angry because they don't get it. Because they refuse to look at it properly. Rather than open their mind to the possibility of seeing something, they just resist. A lot of people think contemporary art makes them feel stupid. Because they are stupid. They're right. If you have contempt about contemporary art, you are stupid. You can be the most uneducated person in the world and completely appreciate contemporary art, because you see the rebellion. You see that it's trying to change things.

The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.

I think music should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.

I did go through a Goth thing, but that was a long time ago. I just like artists that shake it up, that piss people off or make people think or rattle the cage somehow.

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

I am a black new wave artist.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.