Ray Davies Quotes

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

I went to art school in the days when it was what you did if you didn't want to be like everybody else. You wanted to be strange and different, and art school encouraged that. We hated the drama students - they were guys with pipes and cardigans.

My ad-hoc empirical formula is that wherever you grow a lot of rice, there is a lot of art developing as well. My theory goes on to say that after having a nice meal of rice, one feels lethargic and don't think of work. When you don't think of work, you think of art.

The 'Bohemian Manifesto' represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.

All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book.

Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.

If I'm away from painting for a week, I get bored.

Painting is a hobby for me.

I do pottery. I love it. It's very relaxing; it takes me to another planet.

We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.

Make my skin into drumheads for the Bohemian cause.

L.A. is kind of flat these days; I guess Austin and other places are like that now. But that's what I wanted to get across: You could be as crazy as you wanted, and that was OK. You didn't have to be good; people would still come and hear you.

My idea of Heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.

Pampering my skin with moisturiser is very important, but so is drawing. I like sport, but I have to be really interested in it.

I was raised in a bit of a hippie environment.

Sometimes, I sketch, but not every day. I sketch random things, whatever I can get my mind into. I'm not a professional, it is just a hobby I've started.

Idleness - a job that you have to go to, but not necessarily do anything - is the poet's friend.

I've always enjoyed the bohemia of Paisley.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

The first drugs I ever took, I was still at art school, with the group - we all took it together - was Benzedrine from the inside of an inhaler.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.

I was talking to the great Armen Ra, the world's most renowned theremin player, and he told me, "I don't trust old people that do drugs, but I don't trust young people that don't do them." I think what he meant by that is that you've got to be young, you've got to be adventurous and experimental. I'm certainly not asking any of my fans or kids to do drugs, but I certainly wouldn't judge them for doing them.