Paul Signac Quotes

When people are very original, sometimes they are original as a way to resist the mainstream.

As I say, the Animals had a particular concept of themselves as a band. There was an anarchic spirit in it, which was being flattened by commercial designs, attitudes, and needs.

In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Manet did not do the expected. He was a pioneer. He followed his individual whim. Told the public what he wanted it to know, not the time worn things the public already knew and thought it wanted to hear again. The public was very much offended.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.

I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don't like it, you can paint over it!

You have to be original. The people creating a buzz on YouTube are taking risks, and they're doing something different. I like it when 15 year-olds come on and tell me what to do rather than the other way around.

Good fashion for me is like rock ‘n’ roll – there’s always a little rebellion in it.

Today we have people who think that they are wild and free and crazy because they are engaging in risky, insane, round-the-clock sex, using drugs, defying everything decent in society. But that's not freedom, is it? That's not even anarchy. What it is, is simple conformity. That's all it really is.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

The only reason I'm in fashion is to destroy the word conformity.

Do not cringe and make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf. Those with slow seeing say that a noncomformist is a blight on society. But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, that one is practically guaranteed to make an original contribution, a useful and stunning contribution to her culture.

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Never was a cornflake girl; Thought it was a good solution: hanging with the raisin girls.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn't fit for society; I didn't fit into the system.

A writer is like a gypsy. He owes no allegiance to any government. If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.