Julian Schnabel Quotes

You should live hoping you are going to offend people, because then you're doing something.

I want to live in a world where 'normal' is an insult.

If You Want To Rebel Against Society, Don’t Dull The Blade

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

Any pigeonhole is something to be rebelled against.

You're made aware of what the industry is and what you need to conform to; I don't fit that, and I'm never going to.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

People look at me, they know I've appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person. Not a lot of people would think that I spent most of my early years totally rebelling against anything I could, getting suspended from school, going on demonstrations. I was a pretty difficult teenager.

I hope I don't have to buck the system. But if it requires bucking, I will do it.

I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

If it was up to me, there wouldn't be no such thing as the establishment.

The mainstream is always under attack.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

If you want to challenge the system, don't go to bed with it.

It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.

If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.

People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.

Why did I want to break all the rules? Because the rules didn’t make sense, that’s why

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

I was an ordinary boy at school, a young man. In fact, what did the headmaster once say? "You're constantly challenging those in authority; questioning and challenging those in authority." Which was not really the way I saw it. I felt there were questions that had to be answered, and things that weren't quite right.

If people were like me, there would be no mob, because I don't play that game.

People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.

I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right.