Darryl Pinckney Quotes

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

Sometimes I get gigs in weird, artsy places because weird, artsy people embraced my public-access show, which I could only have done in the way I did in New York.

I represent a kind of underground, punk side of drag.

The underground always has the best ideas. Sometimes those underground artists transcend and make it to the mainstream, but most of the time, the big guys just steal from us.

'Rent' was the show that made me want to write. Or that showed me you're allowed to write.

Pork was in 1971, and I stopped hanging out at The Factory by like 1973.

Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo.

I love 'Sunday in the Park with George.' I saw that when I was just, just starting theater school, and I remember singing 'Finishing the Hat' or at least reading the lyrics to 'Finishing the Hat' and other songs from 'Sunday in the Park with George' to my mom to try to explain why I wanted to be an artist.

We weren't art students, but we definitely created our own style and were pretty influenced by Andy Warhol and all the stuff we read and saw and made fun of, you know.

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

I began to fear that the Graham work was not in lots of ways sufficient for me. I suppose it came about from looking at other dancing and being involved with the ballet - something about the air and the way she thought about dancing.

Yes, I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.

Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.

Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Dead, Zeppelin, the Beatles - I paint to this music all of the time.

We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, 'We should do it.' We weren't making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

That's just the way the world's going - everything has to be so instantly commercial that it kills anything that's a little bit underground instantly.

Playing in London in 1979 was exciting: it was at the start of new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people on the streets and in the venues.

I didn't really want to be in the lifestyle without the music. And I didn't want to be in the music without the lifestyle.

I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I'm not the 'Titanic,' I'm 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' I'm not a blockbuster, I'm a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.

Outwardly seeing how your music effects culture and everyday life, is amazing.

I feel every artist has a certain amount of fan following.

An artistic standpoint - I've watched a lot of ballet and source some inspiration from how they move, connect with each other, and find meaning in their movement.