Mike Mills Quotes

Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It's part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.

As soon as street art got popular, I was just like, 'I'm out of here.'

The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.

Street art, of course, is political, because it's illegal, so the very act of doing it is an act of defiance.

I grew up listening to hip hop and embracing black culture, probably because it was 'outsider art.'

Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.

I'm definitely a cult artist.

I actually got into music because of art and because of skateboarding: All those graphics and punk bands and fanzines - they were glued together in my brain.

I grew up in the 90s in the time of grunge when if you didn't go on stage in jeans and a T shirt you weren't 'real.' That seemed ridiculous to me.

I think punk rock, especially for me, was a big middle finger to this whole talent thing.

When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this 'cause we both were outcasts: we wasn't allowed inside the galleries or inside Yankee Stadium. We were writing in the street and making music.

When someone asks you, 'What's punk?' my reply is, 'If you have to ask, you're never going to know.'

If you're trying to get to the underworld of Berlin, it's not suits and ties; it's rock and roll.

I grew up around New York, graffiti culture.

The punk era, at its best, celebrated questioning the norm and the promotion of originality. Both concepts have always resonated with me.

I've realised that there's art in everything we do in London. Suddenly, a photo of two boys sitting on a wall in tracksuits with a dog can go online and be considered a sick photo. That's what we've done to London.

Pirate radio is like street art.

Rumours of me being Banksy are greatly exaggerated. We are all Banksy.

The ideology of Miller's 'lost boys' is an incandescent mix derived from PlayStation violence, Iraq news footage, Peter Pan, William Burroughs's 'Wild Boys,' and anti-G8 millenarianism.

When I first got into graffiti I thought it was going to change the world. But when, 20-years-later, it still hadn't, I got bored of the self-imposed rules.

My work isn't overtly political, although it is sometimes painted in places where I don't have permission to paint, so that could be construed as a political statement.

The principles of punk-rock culture, of self-expression and DIY culture, that really spoke to me.

I remember finding this book, which showed a New York subway train that had been covered in so much graffiti you couldn't recognise it was a train. I thought, 'I want to do that… how do you do that?'